Breath of Life
by Team Damon
Summary: All he knows is death, pain, and the brutal bite of unrelenting cold. She has no idea what she's getting into when she finds him half-dead outside her front door. Immediately post-TWS, Bucky/OC
1. Chapter 1

It had been a really weird day.

Summer was not one to ignore current events, not when they had gotten so bizarre and frightening in the last few years, and especially not when she lived less than three hours away from Washington, D.C.. In a world where Vice Presidents getting in bed with weird fire-breathing terrorists and enabling said terrorists to kidnap the President was now the norm - along with alien invasions and big green rage monsters and 95 year old super soldiers - one had to stay informed to stay alive. At least that's what she told herself, never mind if she was being dramatic.

Especially not now as she sat at her dining room table, peeling potatoes into a trash can at her feet, eyes trained on a TV mounted in the adjacent living room as a cable news network practically salivated with glee over the day's events. There was a lot to cover, what with SHIELD's headquarters and three mysterious helicarriers being demolished and all of the agency's secrets being leaked to the Internet. It was a great day to be a journalist, but not so much a great day to be a citizen. Finding out that your government had been engineering and manipulating history to achieve the death of your freedom was, well, jarring, to say the least, and disturbing on multiple levels for Summer personally.

Talking heads were discussing this nefarious "HYDRA" at length as she listened and continued to peel the potatoes, occasionally glancing out the nearby open glass door to keep an eye on her son as he played quietly outside. She wasn't crazy about him being outdoors in any capacity today, but if David's routine was thrown off in any way at all, there would be hell to pay and meltdowns to be had. Instead she told him to stay close to the door as he played and not dare leave her sight, and so far, he had obeyed perfectly.

And her rifle was loaded and ready nearby, safely away from David's access of course, in case the mayhem in DC happened to spill over into Fall's Church. But that was unlikely, especially here in her neck of the woods, which was literally in the woods and fairly secluded.

She hissed in surprise when she accidentally ran the peeler over her thumb rather than the potato in her grasp. Apparently she had been rather angrily peeling the potatoes because she'd raked the thing hard enough over her skin to make a nice little cut. She rolled her eyes in annoyance at herself and tossed everything aside, glancing at David one more time before going to the sink and turning on the water.

It took her no longer than a moment or two to rinse the cut and grab the closest clean-ish thing - a paper towel - to put pressure on the cut. But, as she discovered when she walked back to the table and felt her heart sink, it was long enough for David to wander off.

"David!" she yelled, rushing out of the open door and looking around the property wildly. Her home sat on a couple of acres surrounded by forest and flanked by a creek that cut through them, but her front yard was not overly large, so she spotted him fairly quickly. Her next words began as an angry yell and died as a frightened whisper. "Da -... David?"

There stood her little five year old boy, among the trees, holding a long stick in his hand, using it to poke at what appeared to be a rather large and perfectly still body laying in the dirt.

She was running before she could scream at David to get away and come inside. It took her only a few seconds to reach the boy and grab him, picking him up and then darting back inside the house just as quickly.

She didn't stop once she got inside, racing towards the basement door on the opposite end of the house as she felt David begin to squirm at her iron-grip on him. "I told you not to leave my sight, David, I told you! Why didn't you listen?"

Before she knew it, she had stowed the boy in the small basement and was holding his shoulders while looking at him as sternly as she could underneath the dim light of a single hanging bulb. "Do not leave this basement until I come and get you. Do you understand me? Do not leave. Stay here and no matter what you hear, don't come up until I get you. Understand?"

He nodded. It was the closest thing to a response that she was going to get, the most she ever got. He was trembling a little bit, and the tension in his face was a giveaway that he was on the verge of a meltdown. He was scared and confused, and that made two of them. She kissed his forehead and then raced off, knowing she had no other choice.

Back upstairs, she made a detour to her bedroom and grabbed her rifle out of its case, rechecking that it was loaded, then held it at the ready as she made her way back outside. She couldn't decide what would be worse, the person lying in the grass being alive or dead. More concerning in her mind was whoever had left the person in that state coming around to finish the job if it wasn't yet done.

Once out the door, she walked slowly towards the body that was still laying in the same position as when she left it. Now that she got a better look at it, she saw that the person was laying face down, potentially not breathing, and bleeding from several different areas. He - it was clearly a man - was also wearing pants that were extremely obviously far too small for his frame, though that seemed insignificant at the moment.

She walked about the property, watching and looking for any potential culprits, but she found nothing. That was a good thing.

She headed back to the body to check it more thoroughly. She shifted the rifle to one hand while she bent down and carefully tried to push the man over by his shoulder. He must have been much heavier than he looked, though, because she frowned as she failed to get him to even budge. His shoulder also felt extremely hard, like it wasn't even an arm. With a grimace, she looked around cautiously and then set the rifle aside before kneeling and putting all of her strength into the task of moving the guy.

It was no small task, and she was fairly sure she pulled something in the process, but she finally got him to his back after much effort. Panting and sighing in relief, she peered at him to get a sense of exactly how bad off he was. He was breathing, but it looked like he was bleeding from two gunshot wounds, one in his shoulder and one in his side. He was bundled up in a hoodie that was comically large compared to his too-small pants, and his ratty black gloves and long, disheveled dark hair completed his overall homeless look. The odd thing was, he wasn't bleeding very badly from his wounds, but they were clearly gunshots.

She debated what to do. Calling 911 was obvious but it generally took ambulances about thirty minutes to get out there to her house, which she knew from experience. Also, somewhat stupidly, she had left her cell phone in the house.

It seemed like a bad idea to leave him out here bleeding in the dirt. Blood poisoning and infections were never fun. But after barely managing to push him on his back - and she wasn't exactly a weakling in general - she doubted she could drag him all the way inside of her house.

Opting in the end to just run in the house and grab her phone, she tapped the man's shoulder awkwardly, as if to pointlessly assure him that she'd be back, and then rose to her feet. She didn't see, but at the same moment, the man's eyes opened. She reached down to grab her rifle only to see it vanish from her sight.

Whirling around, she suddenly stood face to face with the man who had apparently jumped up to his feet in utter silence and found the barrel of the rifle pointed directly at her chest.

Panic sent her hands flying in the air and stumbling back. The man's eyes were wild but laser sharp in their focus, which was currently on her. For one terrifying moment, she was sure that she was going to die, and her last thought was of poor David hiding alone in the basement. She was the one thing he had in the world, and without her, what would happen to him?

To her shock, the man turned around and aimed her rifle at the trees, scanning them as she already had, seemingly bot too concerned about his gaping wounds and apparently not seeing her as much of a threat, either. She didn't allow herself too much relief, however, knowing he could easily turn right around and shoot her still at any moment.

After he was done surveying, he turned back to her, and she stifled a gasp at the sheerly murderous intensity on his bruised face. He did not point the gun at her again, however.

"Who are you?"

"My name is Summer," she answered, her voice sounding quite steady and calm somehow.

She waited for him to reply, to say something, anything. He did not. Instead, his eyes began scanning her house, and her heart sank again.

"You... you need a hospital..."

He glanced at her utterly blankly, then began marching towards her front door, still carrying her rifle as if it were his own all along. Her arms fell to her side and she quickly began walking after him.

"That's my house. You can't - hey! You can't just walk in there!"

But he did. Now she was panicking.

She ran inside after him and closed the door behind her, opening her mouth to let out some extremely tough words that weren't really wise given her current situation, but the sentences never left her lips because the man stumbled to the ground as soon as he reached the middle of the dining room.

He was slumped against the wall behind her dining room table, letting the rifle slip from his grip as he groaned in pain and clutched at his head with his gloved hands. She took the opportunity to grab the rifle, but she did not aim it at him. Instead, she held on to it and went to grab her phone, muttering, "I'm going to call you an ambulance."

That was when he suddenly and brutally seized her wrist, and the force and shock of it sent her stupidly dropping the rifle and stumbling to the floor beside him.

He glared that murderous glare at her and growled only one word. "No."

"Why? You're bleeding, you're -"

"They'll find me."

She took a good, long look at the man. On second thought, he didn't look homeless at all. He was far too focused and intense to be a wandering bum, and apparently on the run from someone who had tried to kill him.

He was still clutching his head with one hand and grimacing like it was killing him, but she could see no head wounds present.

"Who will find you?" she asked.

"They'd kill you, too."

Her eyes widened. Then his grip on her wrist was gone and he leaned forward, holding his head with both hands and crying out in pain. Her hands hovered near him uselessly, and he continued his gut-wrenching cries for what felt like forever but was really only about ten seconds before losing consciousness and falling forward face-first on her hardwood floor.

She swallowed and stared wide-eyed at the man, processing what he had said and giving herself a moment to freak out inside silently but briefly before getting up and jumping into action.

She locked all her doors, closed every curtain, and turned out every light. As she bustled about, carrying her rifle the entire time and wondering why this guy had to show up in her yard of all the other places he could have chosen to go bleed to death in, she did not see the news channel still on her TV showing clips of a slightly blurry video depicting a street fight between a man clearly identifiable by his red, white, and blue shield, and a man dressed in black armor with a shining silver arm, long dark hair flying about his unmasked face. If she had seen the video, and the freeze-framed close up shot of the long haired man's face, instead of turning off her television without so much as looking at it, she might have decided to go drag the injured mystery guy into the creek and throw him in there to drown, to protect herself and her son.

Instead, she looked nervously at the man and kept her rifle in a tight grip as she left the room, running to the basement to check on David and try her best to sufficiently explain to him a situation that she did not yet understand herself.

Ultimately, as it turned out, weird could not even begin to describe that day, nor the month that would follow.

**So. Allow me to explain myself, to those of you reading this who has followed my other stories, mostly Ruin: I finally watched TWS a short time ago after dying to see it at the movies but never quite making it there, and suffice it to say, after it was over, I was flailing and drowning in a massive endless pool of Bucky feels. Following this nuclear eruption of uncontrollable feels, I had to write something or else I was going to scream and rip all my hair out and jump out a window. So, I wrote this, and it is already 95% finished, though I'm still revising the chapters, but since I have only an epilogue left to write, I figured I'd start posting now. Now, Ruin is still in the hands of midnightwings96 and will stay with her, and she is working on the next installment around a busy college schedule. I figure I owe the explanation to anyone reading this who might be frustrated that I'm posting a new story when I handed over custody of Ruin awhile ago. I gave up that story for a lot of reasons, partially because of time constraints and also because of the fact that I do not write certain kinds of content for stories anymore. This story, on the other hand, I wrote out in a record amount of time to keep myself from totally losing it. So, to any Ruin fans who see this story, that story is still very much alive, and I hope everyone will understand and not get mad at me lol. **

**Anyway, aside from all that, thank you to everyone who reads this. As I said before, everything besides the epilogue is written out already and in the process of being edited &amp; revised, so I'll update often without any huge gaps, and probably faster depending on how many folks review (reviews are super motivating :p). I must thank midnightwings96 for always being my sounding board and ever-faithful source of solid, awesome feedback who shares my fandom feels and is always full of fantastic ideas. Since this first chapter was more like a prologue, I'll be posting the next one very soon, probably tomorrow. Please review if you read, and thank you to everyone who did :D**


	2. Chapter 2

When he awoke, he was lying on his back on a hard floor, eyes fixing on the ceiling above him and slowly coming into focus as consciousness nudged at his mind to put the pieces together.

Everything was fragments. Trying to remember where he was and why he was here sent a sharp pain straight through his brain, which was not accustomed to remembering anything. It hurt to try to put the pieces together, to follow the events of the last day as only bits of them floated to the surface, but he did not spend much time lamenting this.

It was enough to remember that he was being hunted and had killed more than a handful of both SHIELD and HYDRA agents in his quest to find safety.

He sat up suddenly and perfectly straight despite the pain in his body that protested, and that was when he saw two pairs of eyes seated at a table in front of him, watching him intently.

It was a woman and a small boy, apparently eating a meal. They both looked remarkably alike, both tan with dark hair - hers long and the boy's short - with the only difference between them lying in their eyes, which in her case were bright blue and his a dark brown. Not that he noticed these things. He vaguely remembered the woman's face and having dismissed her as a non-threat previously, but even remembering that small detail made the ache between his eyes throb worse.

"David, keep eating," the woman said, getting up from the table and never taking her eyes off of him as she did. She walked around the table and then held out her hand to him, opening her fists to reveal what looked like two bullets. "These just popped out of you while you were out. Are you an alien? Asgardian, or whatever?"

He stared at her blankly, saying nothing in reply. Her words meant nothing to him.

"Whatever you are, you can't stay here. You seem to be healing up pretty fast and... weirdly, so. Time for you to go."

Continuing to ignore her, he stood at his full height and went about systematically checking the perimeter for potential threats. When he found none, he ended up back where he began, in the little dining room, silently looking at the woman who hadn't moved an inch the entire time.

"You need to go," she repeated.

He blinked. "No."

She raised her eyebrows. "'_No_'? Look, buddy, after what you said to me before you passed out, I'm not about to open my home to you and put my son in danger."

He didn't remember what he'd said to her. What he could remember, he remembered in disjointed flashes, though it had all happened that day.

The fight on the helicarrier with that strange, inexplicably familiar man who'd called him by a name that was just as confusingly familiar - though it couldn't be right, he knew, because he had no name - that had caused a strange reaction in him, something that he could not explain or comprehend. He didn't know why he dove into the water to rescue the man, but it had set off something within the depths of his mind that had led him here, miles away from Washington D.C. and miles away from the existence that he was trained to maintain.

When he'd left the man on the shore, instinct began screaming at him to report back to his commander and debrief. That was the routine, the protocol that he was programmed to adhere to. The problem was, however, that when he left the shore and saw the state of headquarters - and the city in general, not to mention the lack of fellow agents waiting to pick him up - he wasn't sure how to proceed.

Then something flashed through his mind, something terrible and so frightening that he lost his breath. It was a memory - fuzzy, but discernible - of electric shocks to his brain, agents dressed in black and one man in a crisp suit, grinning at him coldly, and then, an unbearable and unnatural iciness that seemed to encompass his entire being, and then nothing.

The routine, the protocol, was gone. As little as he knew and as confused as he was, he knew that the only thing worse than not reporting back to HYDRA was reporting back to HYDRA. Not that there seemed to be anything to report back to anyway.

So he ran. He wanted somewhere to lie low and think, try to determine exactly what to do now and what these odd memory flashes meant and why the man he'd been sent to kill just laid there and would have let him kill him in the name of... friendship?

The first thing he did was steal the clothes off of the first man that he saw, some homeless peddler in the park. He then dumped his armor and wasn't halfway out of the city before a couple of HYDRA agents tried to take him out. Not take him back, but out. That was when he got the gunshot to the shoulder. Apparently they didn't want their dirty little secret wandering around D.C..

He was attacked again, two more times, and each time he was injured further but not apprehended. He ran most of the way to Virginia - it was his closest and best option, as far as he could tell - slowly weakening and slowly succumbing to the blinding pain growing in his head. The more that he thought of the man on the helicarrier or the flashes of memory and familiarity that he was experiencing, the worse the pain got. Eventually, his damaged brain cut the power.

That was how he ended up in the woods, lying face first in the dirt.

"Did you hear me?"

He raised his eyes to the woman, who was now pointing a handgun in his direction.

She glanced to the side and looked at the boy, who still sat at the table, and said, "Turn around and close your eyes, David."

He didn't give the woman the satisfaction of appearing the slightest bit concerned over her threat. "Put it down."

"Get out of my house," she shot back, hiding her fear of him quite well.

"No."

"If you think for one minute that I won't fire this gun -"

"It won't stop me."

They stood at an impasse, silence filling the air as she clutched the gun and he stared at her as if he were almost bored.

From where he was standing, he saw four different ways that he could kill her before she so much as begin to squeeze the trigger. Even if she got a shot out, he knew the angle with which to deflect it with his bionic arm that would send it rebounding into her, probably somewhere in her torso.

Then a single word was spoken, but not by either one of them, and it spared the woman a terrible fate that would have been hers had she pulled the trigger.

"Mama?"

* * *

Her eyes widened and her mouth fell open. Her grip on the gun faltered, and her gaze turned from the mystery man standing in her house to her son, her little boy who had never so much as uttered a word in his entire life.

"David?" she gasped. "Did you... you just said... you _spoke_."

Big, expressive brown eyes looked up at her and pleaded wordlessly with her. She saw her son's fear and confusion, and guilt instantly washed over her for subjecting him to this scene and not putting him in the basement or at least her bedroom while she dealt with the guy. She had simply panicked when the man refused to leave, and had been operating on survival instincts.

As she marveled, the gun was ripped out of her hands. She flinched and jumped back, but the man was already retreating, stuffing the gun into the waistband of his too-small pants and staring at her with the same blank, odd look he had been giving her all along.

She rushed around the table and grabbed David, hugging him before instructing him to stand behind her. He obeyed. She looked up at the man and asked, "Who are you?"

The blank stare continued for a moment until he answered, "I don't know."

She swallowed. "I don't... I just want to keep my son safe. If you need a place to lie low, there's other places you can hide. I won't tell anyone, I swear. Just please, leave us out of whatever you're running from."

He didn't appear to consider her plea in any meaningful way before he replied, "I need to stay hidden until I find out where to go."

Her heart sunk. "You're from HYDRA, aren't you?"

Instantly his eyes hardened and he took a step forward. She steeled herself and gripped David's shoulders behind her. "What do you know about HYDRA?"

"Just what's been all over the news all day," she replied. "Look, if you are, I don't care, I really don't." She was lying about that part. "Don't hurt us."

His glare became suspicious, and she found she'd much rather have the blank stare. Then, to her surprise, his eyes moved towards the surface of her table, to the two bowls of food she and David had been eating from.

"What's that?"

"Um..." she furrowed her brows a bit. "Potato soup."

He just looked at it, seeming confused and curious and completely lost. In fact, despite his laser-sharp focus she had seen from him a couple times now, he had seemed perpetually lost since he had woken up the first time

"Give me back my gun and I'll give you some. I'm sure you're hungry."

He looked up at her, annoyance flickering across his face. In truth, given the fact that his body seemed to have pushed out two bullets while he slept, she didn't think that it really provided her that much protection from whatever alien/mutant/lab experiment this guy was, but still. She'd have at least a fraction of peace of mind with her handgun back in her possession and her now-hidden rifle as backup.

To her surprise, he lifted the gun and glanced down at it before tossing it on the table towards her. Her relief didn't last long, however, because she realized that he probably didn't mind parting with it because he didn't need it to eliminate her and David should he feel the need to.

She grabbed the gun and stuck in the back waistband of her jeans, then took David's hand and made him walk with her to the kitchen. One handedly she grabbed a bowl and managed to get some of the soup out of the pot and into it, plucked a spoon from the silverware drawer, and still grasping David's hand tightly, turned back to give it to the man. He hadn't moved from where he was standing, and he was still staring at the table.

She placed the bowl down and motioned to a chair. "There you go."

Everything about his next movements were awkward - he didn't sit but rather stood at the table, staring at the food, staring at the spoon before picking it up and seemingly being at a loss for how to eat. She pretended to busy herself as she watched, secretly contemplating calling 911 on her phone and putting it in her pocket, but before she could do that, the man she'd just served dinner to started coughing violently and then proceeded to throw up on her floor.

She would have laughed at her worsening luck if she still wasn't terrified for her son's life.

* * *

He had been starving, but the moment he ate more than two bites of the soup the woman had given him, he had become violently sick. The taste of the food had been foreign and he didn't know why it was warm - he'd been expecting cold - but otherwise the consistency was similar to what little he could recall of what he'd been fed before. The sight of the soup brought back a flash of grayish, slightly clumpy, cold liquid that he must have had been fed on numerous previous occasions, but whatever was different about the woman's food left him gagging and sputtering for what felt like ages.

The pain in his head returned with vengeance during the ordeal, and he ended up half-kneeling on the floor next to the mess as he tried to catch his breath.

"Go lay down on the couch," the woman said, suddenly at his side and attempting to clean the floor. He cracked his eyes open and glanced at her wearily, and she looked away from him to the floor and said, "Go, before I change my mind."

His head throbbed unbearably with with every step he took towards the living room. The little boy stood by, watching him carefully as he passed by.

Nothing felt right. His head, his stomach, his entire body. All of it was in chaos.

Under normal circumstances - though most of this was as yet unbeknownst to him - he would have been carted back to the bowels of SHIELD, methodically cleaned, fed, fully debriefed, memory-wiped, and then stored back into a cryogenic freezer. Since none of that had happened or would happen, and his entire notion of identity had been irrevocably disturbed, he now had to face the terrifying and unknown mental and physical consequences.

The couch was close now, but not close enough. He heard the man on the helicarrier's voice replay in his mind as his head spun_._

The words spoken by that man replaying over and over made his head explode with pain and his insides twist with something he couldn't identify, because it was emotion, and he'd forgotten what that was.

He was unconscious before he hit the couch.

* * *

"Okay, David, come on, let's go to my room, hurry," Summer whispered, steering her son towards the back of the house now that the floor was clean and the man was unconscious. She needed to sit down, look a few things up online, and then decide on how to proceed.

Immediately, David began resisting, stiffening and shaking his head "no" over and over. She knew why - normally after dinner, he would spend an hour playing in his room, so being diverted to her room was a disruption of the routine.

"I'm sorry, sweetie, but I really need you to do this for me," she pleaded with him, trying to make him walk down the hallway. Instead, he continued to shake his head vehemently, and was starting to bounce slightly on his feet, which was never a good sign.

"Fine, fine," she relented, opting to just spend the night in his room and take her laptop in there to do her research while also barricading themselves in.

Once everything was set up and David was contentedly playing with his toys on the floor, she sat on his little twin bed (complete with Captain America sheets and pillows) with her handgun in her lap and laptop resting on the bed against her knees.

She didn't have to look very deeply online to discover far more than she thought she would.

She had intended to search through the leaked SHIELD files that were plastered all over the Internet for lists of their agents to try to identify the apparently nameless man in her living room and determine if he was indeed HYDRA. That ended up being unnecessary, as a headline asking "Winter Soldier Dead or Alive?" greeted her with a grainy but good enough photo of the very man in question.

Heart pounding against her chest, she jumped down the rabbit hole.

Whatever backstory she could have imagined for the guy, she never could have guessed anything remotely close to the truth - and what she learned was only partial information at that. Even more stunning, she would never have expected to end up feeling genuine sympathy for a human killing machine.

When she had read all that she could handle, she let her eyes wander to the back of David's head as she tried to process the terrible information. Yes, he was HYDRA, but he had not always been. He may not have had any memories of his name, but a quick Google search of it would go to various websites, including that of the Smithsonian Institute, and prove him to be a World War II not-so-fallen hero.

An indescribably dangerous, unstable, abused and manipulated mess had been dropped into her house and into her life. The Winter Soldier, apparently responsible for a dizzying amount of assassinations worldwide, had thrown up on her kitchen floor and was now sleeping on her couch.

Of all the places in the greater D.C. metropolitan area that he could have ended up at... he ended up here.

And this just happened to coincide with her brilliant, sweet, nonverbal autistic son speaking his first word to her. Mama. As much as she hated this day, she loved that moment and would treasure it forever.

But, unfortunately, any clear-cut decision she previously had in mind was now nonexistent. She couldn't make the man - the soldier, the assassin, the apparently 90 something year old man - leave her home. The only way she could be rid of him without his agreement was to either turn him in or shoot him in the head. She didn't feel comfortable turning him in anywhere, knowing now that essentially crazed Nazis had managed to infiltrate the entire country decades ago, and the second option was out of the question.

Maybe - hopefully - he would sleep that night and then move on tomorrow. If she was lucky, that would be the end of it. If he flew off the handle and snapped like she assumed someone as damaged and confused as he was capable of, then she had the means to defend herself and David. She would just need to stay on her guard at all times.

"David?"

He didn't acknowledge her, but kept playing with a Captain America action figure playset. The irony was not lost on her.

"I'm glad you spoke today. I'm sorry I scared you. But I'm gonna keep us safe. I hope you know that. And I hope I get to hear you talk again."

He kept playing, and she drifted off in thought as she watched. Her grandmother had to be rolling over in her grave. The sweet rock of a woman who had lost a husband to a Nazi concentration camp and barely escaped herself had been loving and generous enough to leave her granddaughter this property in her will, and that same granddaughter was now allowing HYDRA's top assassin to crash on the couch.

She shook her head. This was a bad idea, a bad, bad idea...

She was rethinking not calling authorities when agonized cries coming from the living room caused her and David both to snap their eyes towards the door and stiffen.

Instantly, she was torn between staying with David, doing her best to ignore the sounds, and leaving the room to check on what was happening.

But she could only listen to the horrible cries for so long before she simply couldn't stay put any longer. She grabbed her gun, admonished David to stay in the room at all costs, and ventured out cautiously to go check on the killer hiding out under her roof.

**First and foremost, a huge thank you to everyone who has read, reviewed, followed and favorited this story so far. It's more than I was expecting and I am extremely thankful to all of you! **

**Now, I would like to address a problem that has arisen from posting this story. I have had multiple (anonymous) reviews regarding the fact that I have _apparently _plagiarized another writer's work and that I have been reported "numerous times." ****I would like to clarify for those in the dark so that you are not left wondering. I have only been reported once, and it was for lyric use and a few direct movie quotes that I used in flashback scenes. I had even credited each song; at the time, I was unaware that song use, credited or not, is against Fanfiction's policy, as well as using any lines directly from a movie. As soon as that fact was brought to my attention, I immediately eliminated all quotes and lyrics from my stories, and for the lyrics that were pivotal to the story (if you will recall the lullaby Aemilia sings to Loki in _Ruin), _midnightwings96 and I put our heads together and rewrote alternate lyrics. **

**Also, yes, there are multiple Bucky/OC stories in which the OC helps Bucky post The Winter Soldier, but no one owns that particular idea. Additionally, I have taken many personal aspects into this story. Midnightwings96, who has yet to read any Bucky/OC fanfics but this one, has stood by me like always throughout the writing process and provided her own ideas.**

**In conclusion, I just wanted to explain the situation to my ever-faithful readers who are currently in the dark. Why can't we all just share in our love for Bucky without bringing up un-needed, immature, high school drama, all for the sake of attention? At the end of the day, we're all here for the same reason, guys. ****Thank you so much to those who have stood by me from the beginning. You're the best.**


	3. Chapter 3

She'd seen enough cheesy movies to know better than to attempt to wake an unstable man who was in the throes of a violent nightmare. Especially now that she knew, thanks to the Internet, that this man in particular was hiding a bionic arm under his hoodie and gloves. She'd never be the well-meaning but dim girl who would go poking around trying to wake him up and then get strangled or stabbed in response.

So, she stood at the edge of the hallway, peering out into the living room with her gun in her hand at her side, cringing as some of the most pathetic sounding cries she'd ever heard intermingled with bone-chilling screams and shouts that sounded like what one would hear if invasive surgery was being performed on someone fully conscious. For all she knew, he could have been dreaming of exactly that.

Natural human sympathy told her to do something - throw something at him, make a loud noise, anything - to wake him up, but any of those things could result in something far worse for her. So when she'd heard all that she could stomach, she turned and headed back to David's room and turned on the television as loud as possible. When that didn't do much to drown out the horrible sounds, she made David cuddle up with her in his too-small bed and listen to a kids' e-book on his learning tablet through headphones. She could still hear everything, but as long as her boy was spared, she could pretend that she still had a slight handle on the overall situation.

More than once as she laid there, staring at the ceiling while David drifted to sleep, she considered packing their bags and jumping into her truck and getting as far away from here as possible. Of course, the last time she'd done something like that, David didn't eat for almost two weeks and ended up in the hospital for five days, so fleeing was a last resort.

Once he was asleep, she eased him to the middle of the bed and covered him up, then sat down on the floor with her back to the bed, watching the door with gun in hand in her lap. Every time she started to nod off, she would be jarred awake by a blood-curdling scream, and she would check David's tablet to make sure that his earphones were still blocking out the sounds. Then she would sit back down, and the cycle would continue.

There wasn't silence until sunrise.

* * *

Flashes that he saw while awake became clearer, longer, scenes rather than vague glimpses, while he slept. One would lead to the next and then sometimes overlap, other times sparking a new scene to begin. It was a force beyond control, the sputterings and struggles of a mind that had lost its identity and autonomy decades ago trying to make sense of what was left and what was floating to the surface from places deep within that HYDRA's systematic torture and abuse hadn't quite erased.

He saw faces both terrifying and terrified, heard voices extolling him as one who had "shaped the century" with his "good work" and others screaming in the wake of that good work. He felt phantom pains of injuries and experiments long past, all of the confusion and the terror of having no idea who he was being compounded by the dreadful growing sense that he really didn't want to.

Some sights within the dreams were clearer than others. Snow, a train, a man with distinctive round glasses smiling and speaking strange words that echoed about his head, and then a dark gray room. He saw the room both empty and also filled with various contraptions and instruments that the mere sight of made his mind - and his voice - scream. Then came the blood - a seemingly never ending stream of it, covering the flesh of his right hand and metal of his left. The smell of terror and death was familiar, as familiar as everything he was seeing, but most familiar was pain.

There was the sound of drilling, of cutting, of sautering and melding and of his voice protesting every last bit of it. Pricks of needles being plunged bone-deep was the least of all of it but still beyond anything he could handle, even in a dream state.

He could hear himself begging for death, for everything to end, and yet with each plea, the pain only became worse. The man in the round glasses spoke things, only some of which he could understand, but the message was clear.

_"It hurts, yes, but when I am done, you will have transcended above pain, above this - you will be magnificent."_

Magnificent_... magnificent_...

".._. the magnificent purpose of HYDRA,_" a different man said, the older one in a business suit. He could place a name to that one, Pierce. He was smiling broadly, filling up his line of vision. "_You're bringing peace to the world. Be proud._"

But there was no room for pride in a chair full of unbreakable restraints, under the force of a memory-wiping machine that attempted to erase every trace of every terrible deed and crime that his hands had committed. There was no pride when he laid there after it was done, half-conscious, staring at the ceiling with deadened eyes and not fighting the agents as they began methodically prepping him for sleep. What they made him drink, he drank. What they shot him up with, he didn't know or care. When they dragged him out of the chair and towards what looked like some ancient, strange pod, he was at their mercy.

But the frigid, consuming cold that waited inside - that was something their memory-wiping tactics never did fully erase, not a single time.

_Bucky?_

That man on the helicarrier, that name. It was as a thaw to a long-frozen memory, one that kept trying to dance out of his grasp the second he thought he could catch it.

What he said on the helicarrier played through the dream like a broken record, over and over, making less sense each time.

He said his name was James Buchanan Barnes... but how could it be?

The man's face changed, warped into that of one that was old, wrinkled, and slightly scarred. The voice went from desperate and caring to flat and logical with a clear Russian accent. "_Your name? You have no name, and I'll tell you why. You're more than a name. You're more than a man. You are a revolution. You're going to change the world and make it safer than we could have ever dared to dream without you. You are the Winter Soldier."_

And that is what he was - not a man with a name but a soldier with a title, a calibrated machine meant for something that he was told was great and admirable. All of the bloodshed was to prevent greater bloodshed, to cleanse the world.

All of the bloodshed, all of the screams and the pleas and the eyes of those whose lives he ended - the fragments of what little his brain was recalling of it spun through the dream, flitting in and out, laying the foundation for the horror that would occur when he woke up and remembered it all.

He awoke suddenly to the sound of a glass bowl and cup hitting the coffee table in front of the couch. The sounds and images of the dreams melted away as he blinked his eyes, stowing somewhere in his mind to haunt him further when they pleased. He sat up and looked up warily at the now-familiar woman - he'd forgotten her name - crossing her arms and trying not to look him in the eye.

"Um..." she shifted slightly on her feet, fiddling with her dark ponytail before muttering awkwardly, "Good... morning, I guess."

* * *

The blank, weary stare she got in return was nothing short of expected. The last hour or two, he had slept quietly, which had been a nice change from most of the night. She cleared her throat and gestured to the bowl of plain white rice that she'd just cooked. "I figured that after last night's incident with the soup, this might be bland enough for you to handle. Assuming what you need is bland food. I really don't know, I'm just guessing. I'd try the juice first, though. And if you do throw up again, it would be great if you tried to make it to the toilet first."

The blank stare fell to the bowl and then the cup, and she shifted again before adding, "Speaking of which, you probably need to use the bathroom, so come and I'll show you where it is."

She figured that if she waited for him to get up first, she'd end up in the middle of another awkward staring contest, so she turned around and started towards the hallway, hoping he'd follow. To her surprise, he did.

Once he was safely in the bathroom, she stood outside, pacing slightly, hoping he didn't hit something with his robot arm that would cost her a fortune to fix. When he opened the door and reemerged, she glanced at him and then made a point to stare at her suddenly fascinating feet as he walked past her. She peeked quickly into her bathroom, finding it all still intact, and then hurriedly caught up with him.

He returned to the couch when they made it back to the living room, and she stood nearby as he began a staring contest with the orange juice she'd offered him. Having a feeling that this would take awhile, she moved closer and perched on the edge of the coffee table.

"So... I don't know how long you plan to... hide here, but I figured I would explain a few things to you while you're here."

He looked at her, then reached out and picked up the glass of juice.

"I'd take slow sips," she offered, only to see significant annoyance pass through his eyes. He took a slow sip anyway. She drew a breath and went on. "My name is Summer. I told you that yesterday but I wasn't sure if you remembered. My son, David, is five years old and, according to the last ten doctors we've seen, 'severely autistic'." She used air quotes not because she disbelieved the diagnosis, but for the negativity It implied. "I'm telling you this because I run a tight routine with him. It's the only way he'll function. I worked hard to get him to this point and if you disrupt his day to day life even in the slightest, there will be a lot of screaming and probably a hunger strike and... well, it'll make your headaches worse and make me a lot less willing to feed you."

He had taken to staring at the bowl of rice in his hands after drinking some of the juice, and she wasn't sure how much of her words were processing with him, but she went on anyway. "So anyway... just ignore him when you see him. He keeps to himself and he doesn't talk, so... shouldn't be hard."

He took a cautious bite of the rice, and she watched him carefully, looking for any signs of impending vomit. If it happened again, she decreed silently, he could clean it up himself.

"How long do you think you'll need to stay?" she asked, breaking the silence after he seemed to be handling the bland food okay. Her question was met by an uncooperative stare. She sighed. "Some people might say it's rude to ignore the person feeding and helping you."

"Sorry," he replied quickly, a little too quickly, and his eyebrows furrowed at his own response. A few seconds passed and he said quietly, "I don't know."

"What do you know?"

His expression became even more troubled and confused. Then he looked at her and answered her question with a question. "Why do you care?"

"I don't," she shrugged. "I just want to know what I'm dealing with."

Silence resumed. She sighed again and fiddled with her ponytail for what must have been the fiftieth time. "Look... I know that you're a big time assassin - maybe _the_ assassin - because all of SHIELD's secrets were leaked to the Internet yesterday and your face is all over it."

That got his attention. "What?"

"Look, I -"

Suddenly he stood, towering over her, face murderous, and she resisted the urge to grab the gun that was stuffed in the back of her jeans as she jumped up and backed away, hands up. "Hey, calm down. Nobody knows where you are or anything, it's just that files were leaked and now -"

"Files? My file?" he asked, eyes suddenly not so full of rage but no less intense.

"Yeah."

"Show me."

She hesitated. He deserved to know the truth of everything, after all that she had read the night before, but she was fairly sure that if his memory was sparse now and he didn't know his own name, it might be a bad idea for him to learn it all in one sitting from a leaked Internet file.

"Show me!"

She flinched and relented. "Fine. Stay here and sit down. Keep eating."

Walking away, she went to grab her laptop and foresaw about a thousand horrible scenarios of what would happen should he read his backstory and have a massive breakdown. House destroyed and David hurt or killed was the worst of them.

Or, on the flipside, maybe he would read and become so enraged at being brainwashed that he'd leave immediately to go hunt down the remainders of HYDRA, which the Internet told her was probably a somewhat sizable remnant.

Still, she didn't want to take the risk.

Before she took the laptop out to him, she sat on the floor in David's room and quietly searched for the most general, least detailed report on him that she could find. She looked for an article about the file, not the file itself, which contained only the basics like his name, his years of service and the nature of it, and mentioned the mind and memory control exerted (lest he believe he was naturally a mass killer and keep his streak going with her).

She found such an article on a blog, and as she stood up and steeled herself for whatever happened next, she glanced back at the still-sleeping David and hoped that she was making the right decision.

* * *

"Here," the woman said softy, slightly startling him from his thoughts as he looked up and saw her handing him a thin laptop computer. He hesitated to grab it, so she sighed and placed it in front of him, on the coffee table.

"Do you know how to use a computer?"

He shook his head, staring at the screen and feeling a bit sick at a photo of himself staring back at him. It was a photo of himself in his full uniform and mask, jumping from one car to another on a highway. He couldn't place such a memory.

"Just push this arrow key here when you're ready to read more," the woman said, showing him which key she was talking about. "Can you really not remember anything?"

He looked at her, not quite as blankly as he had been. He was too afraid of what he was about to read to appear bored or lost.

Her blue eyes only met his for a moment before she nodded, taking his expression for what it was, and walking away to leave him to his discovery.

He looked back to the computer and wondered for one brief moment if he wasn't better off in the dark. He could remember his dreams last night and if they were bits of memories as he suspected they were, then what he was about to read may be more than he could take.

But, in the end, there really was no alternative. He had to know.

Starting at the first line, he began to read.

_Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes, AKA "The Winter Soldier", is presumed dead after yesterday's showdown with Captain America atop a SHIELD - or HYDRA, apparently - helicarrier. That's right - Captain America's right-hand man from WW2, fallen war hero, is arguably the deadliest assassin that the world has ever seen. Files leaked to the Internet thanks to my new favorite Avenger, the Black Widow, tells us the following about Barnes' ordeal:_

_He was presumed KIA by the US after falling off Dr. Arnim Zola's train, but a Soviet patrol picked him up. HYDRA took over his care and not only saved his life but enhanced him physically with some sort of copycat super soldier serum, and they replaced a lost arm with a bionic metal limb._

_The files don't specify what took place during his years in the USSR, but it appears that they erased his memories and were responsible for his training and "reeducation" when he was not cryogenically frozen or assassinating someone. It's implied, however, that he became American HYDRA's property after the Soviet Union dissolved._

_From there, the file simply states that he is the best at everything that he is trained in, far superior to most physically thanks to HYDRA's experiments, and a fully controllable asset that answers to HYDRA alone, free of any other possible allegiances so long as "strategic mental protocol" is followed. I assume that's code for whatever brainwashing and memory-frying they did to him._

_He is presumed dead now, but some are claiming that like Captain America, he survived yesterday. Whatever his fate, his case only makes this whole HYDRA debacle even more shameful for this country. What an ultimate insult to take the symbol of America's freedom and strength's famed best friend and brainwash him into our worst enemy - and all from this parasitic evil that has been pulling the strings in our government all this time!_

As he read the final few lines, his breath was coming in short bursts and a painful splitting pain was now hammering into his skull. The food that he'd managed to eat was now fighting to come back up, and the sight of an old black and white photo at the bottom of the web page of himself - as he used to be, as the man who had died a hero - sent him into a full-blown, debilitating panic.

He couldn't breathe. He could barely see through his eyes, burning as they were with unshed tears of rage and horror.

He was up and running out of the house before he could register where his feet were taking him. The outside air did nothing to help him breathe past the elephant sitting on his chest, and it did nothing to ease his mind as the words he read connected with little memory fragments that were now bursting forth, confirming those words and confirming what the man on the helicarrier had said.

It was all true.

He ran into the forest, running up a hill and not stopping once until he was forced to, to vomit over a tree trunk in the midst of a small clearing. On his knees, his eyes burned hotter and watered with the violent ejection, and though his throat ached and tore with the pain of it, it helped to project out some of the chaos that was boiling over on the inside. When he was done, he ripped off the pointless gloves and hoodie, glaring down at his hands and recalling how blood had gushed over them in his dream. On the outside they were clean, but inside, they were stained to the bone with blood that he had shed. Blood that they had made him shed.

He clenched both hands into fists and closed his eyes shut as tightly as he could before letting out a guttural, violent, excruciating scream that echoed off the trees and reached the house below in its ear-piercing volume. All of his rage, confusion, horror, shame, and denial was poured into the sound, but expressing it did not expel it. His metal fingers dug into the tree trunk and pushed right through the bark, all the way to the roots, and he grabbed one, ripped it from the ground, and threw it into another tree. His target split in half and fell noisily to the ground with the impact.

That man - Steve - just the thought of him sent another harrowing howl from his lungs. The full or even partial memory wasn't there but a fragment was, two actually - one of a skinny kid who had Steve's face, laughing, and the other was of the same version of Steve he'd tried to kill on the helicarrier, holding on with one hand to a moving train's door and holding out his other to take.

Steve had always been there, from the beginning and through to the end - the end of the line - and now he was there again, somehow, though there never should have been an "again". The fall from the train should have been the end. He should not be here, should never have been "rescued", should simply not be.

But, the irony was, he _was_ dead. The "Sergeant Barnes" that he'd read about, the "Bucky" that Steve had pleaded with, was gone, and this was what was left of him - the pieces that had survived HYDRA, nothing more than a successful experiment and an empty-shelled blank slate that had betrayed every last principle held dear by its former inhabitant.

When his voice faded and allowed him to scream no longer, the tears finally came. Each drop was full of disgust, dismay, and shame, and each dropped to the earth to be replaced by another. Each one that fell did nothing to soften the ache inside, and nothing could stop the sharp pains in his skull that were protesting loudly against the pieces left of his memories being re-formed to paint a picture that he never wanted to look at.

It was a wonder to remember so little and yet grieve so heavily, and he knew that as he remembered more, the shame and the pain and the guilt would only get worse. If was already unbearable now. But it was no more than a soulless killer deserved.

Meanwhile, down the hill, standing inside her open front doorway and leaning against the frame was Summer, who surprisingly found herself shedding a few tears of her own as she listened to the soldier scream out the horror of discovering the truth of himself.

She had never heard anyone sound so utterly broken and devastated before. It made his cries during his sleep seem like nothing. It made her blood run cold and heart pound to hear it. And his reaction to the article that she showed him proved that every word of it was true.

She wiped at her eyes and, feeling otherwise useless, said a silent prayer for the broken man who history told her died with honor and should be resting in peace, not falling to pieces. As she did, he half-slumped down to the ground with his back against a tree, fighting memories with strength he didn't have and feeling doubly ashamed that a significant part of him wanted nothing more than to go back to HYDRA and have all of this erased and taken away.

It would have been so much easier to simply forget, to be the blank slate that he had been redesigned to be. But HYDRA was gone, at least structurally, and whoever was left of it didn't want him. His fate was this - truth, shame, guilt, rage, and fifty years' worth of sins to slowly, agonizingly, spend the rest of his life recalling.

**A/N: Hello all! Not much to say today, other than my usual big THANK YOUs for those of you who read, review, favorite, follow, or lurk :) thank you all very, very much for doing so :))) Also, thank you to midnightwings96 who helped me officially finish this story a few days ago with her feedback for the epilogue, so everything is done &amp; finished and all that is left is to post. If these early chapters seem slow, do forgive me - it gets a lot better very soon. :D Next chapter will be up soon, and until then, I love you all &amp; hope you enjoyed :D**


	4. Chapter 4

David awoke while his mother'a unexpected guest was busy coming to terms with the truth in the forest outside. By the time Summer fed him and got him started on his usual post-breakfast habit - watching an hour or two of cartoons - she found herself sitting at the kitchen table, staring blankly at her laptop screen, starting to wonder what exactly would happen next.

Would he not come back? Would he continue on through the forest, seeking revenge perhaps, or finding some underpass to sit and rot under? Maybe find a cliff to pitch himself off of? Judging by what she'd heard of his breakdown out there, nothing was out of the realm of possibility.

Trying to put it all out of her mind for at least a few minutes, she scrolled through some news articles and half-paid attention to them as she glanced down at the date on the bottom-right of the screen and realized she had a paper due in less than two days. Suppressing a groan, she wondered if harboring a traumatized HYDRA fugitive was worthy enough of a leave of absence from online college.

Ignoring school for the time being, she gave into the urge to research her guest further than she had the night prior. This time, she focused on articles and accounts of his time pre-HYDRA, which meant she mostly read old newspaper and magazine articles extolling the adventures of the famous Howling Commandos.

Reading more in-depth about who he had been before HYDRA came along only saddened her further. It also was slightly mind-boggling that two men from that era, himself and Steve Rogers, both looked just as young as they did in the photos she was perusing. But the difference was, Rogers looked exactly the same now, judging by his image on her son's bed sheets and what she saw of him on the news. Her guest, however, seemed to be an empty shell compared to what he had been, noticeable by even the quickest glance. There was just nothing left of what had been.

Eventually, she closed the laptop and drummed her fingers on top of it. David was sitting happily in the living room, content with his cartoons, and it had grown quiet outside. One side of her brain told her to pray he didn't come back and be happy that he was finally out of her house. The other told her to march into the forest and make sure he hadn't hung himself or maybe used his weird arm to rip his own head off.

She sighed and closed her eyes, shaking her head at herself. This entire situation was idiotic. She was in over her head with this one, she was sure of it.

Glancing into the living room, she called softly, "Hey, kiddo - want to come outside for a little bit?"

* * *

He hadn't moved an inch for nearly two hours. He was still slumped against the base of a tree, staring ahead at other trees, silent and red-eyed as he sat quite literally lost in thought. Memories were trying to form from the fragments and his mind was trying desperately hard to make sense of it all, but mostly all he was managing to do was confuse himself further.

Whatever the full story was, he didn't want to know it. He didn't want the memories to resurface any more than they already had. He didn't want to be awake or aware of anything. He wanted to go back to when everything made sense, when all that he knew was a mission, an objective, and a result.

He didn't bother to look when he heard the distinct sound of footsteps and leaves crushing underneath him. He kept staring straight forward, even when a few moments passed and a woman's familiar face suddenly filled his line of vision.

She had knelt down in front of him, at a somewhat safe distance, and was speaking softly. "Hey. Just wanted to make sure you were still alive."

A single blink of his eyes was his only acknowledgment of her words. She looked him over, eyes immediately drawn to his exposed metal arm that she was seeing for the first time, now that his hoodie and gloves were laying somewhere in the dirt, leaving him in a too-big black t shirt that didn't hide much. She stared at the arm for a moment and then glanced at the tree that had met an early fate thanks to it, and after clearing her throat a little, she turned back to him. "I shouldn't be doing this, but I'm asking you to come back inside the house. I'm an idiot for it but it's not the first time I've been an idiot, so whatever. I think that you deserve some help. Actually, you deserve a lot more help than I can give you, but I think I'm all you got at the moment."

"You can't help me," he muttered.

She shrugged. "I can feed you more bland food and let you use my shower. That's something, right?"

She smiled just barely, and he narrowed his eyes at the gesture. The tiny smile then instantly faded and she sighed. "Just come on. Please. Before you decide to demolish the forest."

She then stood up and extended a hand to him. He stared at it as if it was the single most bizarre thing he'd ever seen. She huffed impatiently and shook it a little.

"We need to work on the staring. You should talk more and stare less."

His eyes shot up to hers and he glared at her. Then he grabbed her hand with his right one, grimacing a little bit and retracting his hand quickly once he was standing.

"Your arm okay?" she asked, noticing the way it hung oddly at his side, probably for the first time.

"It's broken," he muttered, recalling how his supposed former best friend had broken it during their fight on the helicarrier. It already wasn't hurting as bad as it had at first, so he'd been ignoring it.

"But - you've been using that arm," she said in slight disbelief, still looking at the arm in question. Then she added, "Although I did watch bullets literally fall out of you last night. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that you have freaky healing... powers, or something."

He looked away from her and then noticed her son standing near the tree line, watching them curiously. The boy looked him in the eyes but showed no fear, no apprehension, just curiosity.

"Come on," the woman said, stepping in front of him and then stopping and turning back to face him. "Oh - now that you know your name, can I call you by it? Do you mind? Is there anything you'd prefer I call you?"

His supposed name didn't feel real, so he didn't know how to answer. Whoever he was now, he was sure that he wasn't that man anymore. It was more fitting for him to have no name than that name.

"Can I just call you James, maybe?"

He shrugged. She seemed to be happy with that response.

"Okay. Good."

She then turned and continued walking, taking her son's hand when she reached him. His eyes fell on their joined hands and then there was the smallest flicker of a memory behind his eyes, one that was gone almost as soon as it had come, of a similar scene, of a smaller hand clasped inside a bigger one and a woman's warm, smiling face and the sun shining bright behind her.

He furrowed his brows and blinked against the dull ache that the picture had brought, then started walking when he realized the woman and boy were already halfway down the hill.

He had a reason for relenting and following her back into the house.

* * *

Still hoping that she wasn't making the dumbest mistake of her life, Summer stood at the front door and let David in first, then her guest of honor - who she was going to have to get used to calling "James" - and then closed the door. David did not hesitate to head back into the living room to finish watching the cartoons that had gotten interrupted, leaving Summer to stand awkwardly for a moment, trying not to stare at the metal arm that was maybe a foot away from her.

It was an impressive arm. Terrifying and completely bizarre, but impressive. And the red star symbolic of communism on it that she could see through the tattered short sleeve was just a lovely touch.

Brainwashed or not, she was pretty sure that this _was_ the dumbest decision of her life.

Eventually she realized that he was staring at her staring at him.

"Uh..." her eyes flickered back and forth from his own to the floor and eventually settled on the hallway. "Sorry. Just. Uh. Shower. I was going to let you take a shower."

"What?"

She looked up at him to find utter confusion on his face.

"A shower," she repeated.

"I don't..." he began and then trailed off.

"Don't.. what? Take showers?" she asked slowly, raising an eyebrow.

"I don't want to."

The look on his face as he pointedly did not look at her made it clear that he was adamant about not wanting to. "Well... I mean... you're kind of bloody and... there's like... tree bark in your hair. Wait - is the arm not supposed to get wet?"

"It's not the arm."

"Then..."

"I don't like the cold."

Her eyes widened. She suddenly got it. "Oh! Oh my gosh - did they not ever let you... you know what, never mind. Come with me, I'll show you something."

As usual, she began walking, and he didn't follow. She stopped and turned back. "Seriously. It's not what you think it'll be. Come on."

This time, he followed, though not without a grimace that let her know that he found her annoying. Oh well. She got to her bathroom and opened the door, turned on the light, and turned around and waved her hand towards the shower as he stood off in the hallway, looking highly wary. "I guess you don't remember these. I'm afraid to ask what you do remember, but..."

She slid her shower curtain aside, stepped one foot in and grabbed the shower head off the wall, then flipped on the hot water and stepped out. "Come here," she said, looking over her shoulder and gesturing with her head. He still looked extremely unsure, but he slowly came forward.

"Now put your hand out," she said when he was close enough to reach the stream of water. After a moment's hesitation he complied, and as the warm water ran over his right hand, she said, "See? You can make it as hot as you want by turning that knob on the wall. I don't know what you're used to doing or what they made you do, but whatever it was, you don't have to do any of that anymore."

He kept watching the water, nodding slightly at her words, and then she reached forward and turned it off. After mounting it back on the wall, she turned and then glanced at her little rack of shampoos on the other side of the tile wall and muttered "... Right. So, I guess you can use my son's soap. It's shampoo and conditioner and soap all in one. It's either that or you can smell like a rose garden."

She glanced up to find him simply watching her ramble on. She cleared her throat and looked towards the door. "Right. So uh... I'll leave you to... that, and... oh wait. Clothes. Crap. Wait, I have an idea."

She sprinted off to her bedroom, which was very close by, just across the hall, and started digging towards the back of her closet. When her search surprisingly bore fruit, she sprinted back to the bathroom to find him standing exactly as he had when she'd left him. She set down a pile of clothes on the closed toilet and explained, "My brother left some of his clothes here by accident last time he visited. He's not quite as tall as you but he works out and... anyway. These should fit good enough." She then smiled at him and asked, "Any questions or anything?"

"Why are you doing this?"

He asked in such a small voice that she almost didn't hear him at first. His expression seemed half suspicious and half curious as he waited for her to answer, and it took her a moment to gather her words. "It's not a big deal. It's just a shower and some food and a couch to sleep on."

"But you know who I am."

His face contorted slightly as he spoke, as if the words caused him pain and made him wince just a little bit. "Yeah. And you do scare me, I can't lie about that. I just... given what I've read about you, I think you could use a break for once. That's all."

She ended with a shrug, and with that, she turned and walked out of the bathroom, closing the door behind her. Then she quickly opened it again and stuck her head inside. "Oh, and watch the robot arm. I can't afford any big expensive repairs to this bathroom if you accidentally smash a hole through it." Then she closed the door again and headed back to the front of the house.

For the next 20 minutes, she passed the time by fixing David a snack and making her third cup of coffee that day. Then she sat down at the dining room table with the drink, spending the rest of the time staring at her cell phone and controlling her urges to do something stupid like tell her brother what she was doing. He was on the other side of the country in California with his family and had been regularly texting her since all hell broke loose in D.C., but she hadn't answered his last text yet for fear she'd accidentally panic and text-yell in all caps that there was a brainwashed HYDRA assassin currently in her shower and to send help because she had a bad case of major sympathy for him.

_No_. She pointedly looked away from the phone and took a giant drink of coffee. As she was chugging, her gaze traveled from outside the front door to the living room, where David was still perfectly happy, and then on to the hallway, which was the point when she almost - _almost_ \- choked and descended into the land of cliches that she'd done so well avoiding so far. Instead, she just swallowed awkwardly loudly and immediately looked away from the wet, shirtless, aforementioned brainwashed assassin making his way down the hall with what looked like a scrap of fabric in his hands. At least he was wearing the pants she'd given him and not just a towel, which would have been the mother of all ridiculous cliches and just unfair.

"Um..."

She looked up then as he lingered at the edge of the hallway, pretending to have just noticed him for the first time. Instantly, her eyes tried to glue themselves to the ugly and brutal-looking scarring that marked where flesh met metal on his right shoulder. It was impossible not to look - whatever operations that had attached the thing to his body must have been absolutely horrifying.

He held up what had once been a shirt and muttered, "I didn't mean to tear it..."

"Oh," she said, forcing herself to stop being rude and staring like a gawky idiot. "That's okay. Um... let me see what else I have."

She then got up and squeezed past him in the hallway - trying a little too hard to avoid touching him but finding success - and then headed back to her closet to see what other relics she could unearth.

Once back inside the small, rather messy, closet, she began looking for something that she did not want to touch, see, or otherwise deal with at all, but it would probably fit him better than anything else she had and her options were limited. Five minutes into her search, she frowned and held a large black pullover hoodie in her hands, eyeing the thing with disdain before getting up and walking out of the closet.

Immediately, she gasped and clutched at her chest at the sight of "James" lurking right outside the closet door, which she was not expecting. She'd left him waiting outside of her bedroom, and now she'd narrowly avoided another potential cliche - colliding accidentally with a half-naked, still slightly wet, man.

"Sweet mother of... I was not expecting that," she sighed and rolled her eyes, taking a step back and trying to catch her breath. He didn't offer any apologies, but just kept standing there with that unnerving stare of his. She held out the hoodie and thrust it at him, and he took it wordlessly.

As he fit his arms through the sleeves and started to pull it over his head, she told herself to stop watching and kick him out of her room, but she didn't. It had taken her this long to start noticing that he wasn't horrible looking. The fact that he was now clean had helped with that revelation. Not that it mattered. It was just now officially not something she could wholly ignore.

The hoodie fit him decently well. He pulled his damp hair out from the back and then shoved his hands in the pockets, and she was reminded of something. "Oh! Do you want a sling or something for the arm? I could drive you to a clinic somewhere if you wanted."

"No," he answered quickly.

"But -"

"It'll heal fine."

For his sake, she hoped he would.

"Okay. Well... come with me and I'll make you something to eat."

She almost told him that he wore the hoodie far better than the man who had given it to her had, but she kept her mouth shut and headed out to the kitchen as he followed behind.

* * *

When the girl had mentioned the word "shower" the first time, he'd had an immediate visceral reaction to the word and a memory more physical than mental of cold, hard, unmerciful water that he wanted to avoid at all costs. She seemed to understand though, somehow, and to his surprise, her words had been true and the shower had been nothing like what he was expecting. It wasn't easy, though, because not two minutes into it, the reason why he'd refused it at first replayed fully in his mind.

He remembered his post-mission ritual in its entirety, the same one he'd doubtless endured countless times over the last five decades. It was methodical, routine, and utterly devoid of dignity, but he didn't have much of a concept of what dignity was to know the difference. HYDRA treated him as what he was to them, a weapon, not a human being, and they maintained him as one maintains a weapon, not as one cares for a person. Or even an animal.

He remembered ice-cold water sprayed at him from all angles and being sprayed harder and colder if he complained or tried to fight the handlers off, and being restrained at least once because of it. Now he had to wonder why it had to be so cold when this random woman was perfectly capable of offering him hot water. Couldn't the people he had served so well do the same?

After the shower, he had spent a good five minutes staring at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, mostly glaring at his shoulder and trying not to remember anything related to acquiring the arm. But it had been in his dreams the night before, and the mental images were much clearer now, and those were far worse than frigidly cold showers.

He was now positive that he'd been fully conscious when they'd attached the metal limb. Too many flashes of screaming, of indescribable pain, the smell of flesh and metal burning and melding, and uncaring faces above attested to the truth of that.

But why?

Why any of it?

It was a short time later that he was again seated at the woman's dining room table, wearing borrowed clothes and staring down a new offering of food that, if he caught a break, he might be able to avoid throwing back up this time. More rice, and something that the woman had called an "applesauce cup".

He ate it all in silence, feeling slightly sick the more he ate but too hungry to stop. Meanwhile, the woman sat across from him, doing something on her phone, and every few moments, he'd get a whiff of something that smelled amazing. Familiar, too, but only in the slightest sense.

"What's that smell?"

She jumped a little bit and looked up from her phone to him. "Huh? What smell?"

He shrugged.

She looked around the room, as if to search out the culprit, and then glanced down at her cup. "Is it coffee?"

The word seemed as vaguely familiar as the smell. She held out the cup for him to smell, and that confirmed it as the source of the scent.

"Oh... well, I'd offer you some, but... did you keep down the rice from this morning?"

He shook his head. She frowned and tapped at her cup. "Well... once you're eating normal and keeping everything down, I'll make you some. You probably haven't had coffee in, what, seventy years. That's rough."

She seemed to talk a lot. He wasn't sure why, or how to answer half the time. And she never maintained eye contact for long. He assumed it was because he terrified her. Surely she was lying, and she was only helping and feeding him out of fear.

"So... are you remembering more things?"

He didn't answer, as was becoming the custom.

"You know, it helps to talk things out. It doesn't really matter who you're talking to, either. Talking, just getting the words out of your head can go a long way."

He stared at his now-empty bowl, still feeling hungry. "I don't want to."

"All right. I won't bug you about it."

Silence fell once more, and he retreated back inside his thoughts. Physically, he was feeling far better. His arm was indeed healing quickly and the shower had helped ease other aches and pains, but he was still every bit as distraught and confused as he had been earlier in the forest.

The more he thought, the more he remembered, and he didn't want to remember anymore. But what else was there to do but think?

Something in his peripheral vision ended up garnering his attention. Slowly, he turned his head and saw the little boy, David, standing right next to where he was sitting and holding something out for him to take. His eyes fell to the object, which appeared to be a toy, and then he glanced back up at the boy, entirely confused.

Then he heard footsteps rushing close, and then Summer was behind the boy, looking panicked for half a second before mouthing "take it". He frowned at her, and she mouthed it again and again until he relented and took the toy from the boy's hand.

He looked down at the toy, a small figure of a man with gold horns on his head and dressed mostly in green. It had a slightly gruesome face, and he looked back to Summer questioningly as David jumped into the chair next to his own.

"He's asking you to play with him," she explained, taking a seat as well. "Which is kind of huge. He'll usually only play with me. Oh, and that's his Loki action figure. Do you know who that is?"

He shook his head. She continued, "He's this alien guy who tried to invade the earth last year. The Avengers stopped him. He doesn't actually look like that, though. Toy companies decided to make him look extremely creepy instead of..." she shrugged, trailing off. "Anyway."

"Avengers?"

She nodded. "Superheroes and aliens are suddenly supposed to be normal now. And David's favorite Avenger is the one he's holding right now."

He looked at the boy's hand and his eyes widened a little bit. He hadn't expected to see a tiny likeness of the man who had made him remember so much, the man he'd almost killed on the helicarrier.

"He's obsessed," Summer said, slightly apologetically. "I hope it won't bother you or freak you out."

Still staring at the tiny Captain America, his memory stirred. A poster somewhere, of the same costumed man, of Steve, of Captain America. Fanfare and comic books and... a song, maybe?

"You're remembering something, aren't you?" Summer asked.

He looked up but didn't answer. Then her eyes widened and she scrambled out of her chair. "I just had a brilliant idea. Hang on."

A moment later, she was back, holding a pad of paper and a pen out to him. "Write down what you remember. Everything you've remembered. This way you don't have to talk about it to anyone, but you'll get it all out and be able to keep track of it all."

A little baffled by her enthusiasm, he took the offered items and then handed her the little alien toy in turn. She took it and he set the paper down, seeing the sense in her idea. He opened it to the first empty page, and while he did not want to review anything that he'd remembered, if doing this eased the ache in his head, he'd try it.

And so, he began to write. He kept writing long after Summer and her son had gone on to a different part of the house. He wrote in Russian, because it was what he automatically began writing when he had penned the first word. It didn't feel right, but since it seemed to be instinctual at the same time somehow, he kept on.

The rest of the day was a blur of scribbling, another bland meal, and more thinking and more scribbling. He was left alone for most of it, and by the time it was dark outside and all was quiet, the storm raging within his mind was his first clue that perhaps writing everything down had not been the best idea.

His thoughts grew steadily darker, and he recalled his original reason for agreeing to come back to this house - the woman's gun.

* * *

Summer put David to bed that night feeling considerably better about the situation than she had the night before. She still took up watch at the end of the bed, on the floor facing the door, with her gun, because anything else would have been foolish. But, all things considered, everything seemed... tentatively not-horrible. Possibly. Maybe.

James had been writing all night, and from the few times she'd managed to sneak a peek, drawing too. She left him alone for the most part, making sure that he ate and drank again before she and David turned in for the night. All in all, life with an assassin in the house seemed to be far more boring than she would have imagined.

Due to her lack of sleep the night before, she fell asleep very quickly at her post, head lolling to the side and her grip slackening on the gun in her lap as slumber overtook her.

So deeply out she was, she did not hear the door opening slowly and almost completely silently, nor the footsteps that crept towards her almost ghost-like in their lightness and quietness. She didn't so much as twitch when fingers gently plucked the gun from her hands, and she continued to sleep when the footsteps faded and the door closed behind them.

* * *

On a stranger's couch, alone in the dark with his thoughts, fragmented memories, and more pain than one lifetime could hold, a soldier sat clutching a gun that he'd just stolen.

He'd been right about Summer, and the terror he inspired in her. Why else would she fall asleep on the floor, sitting up towards the door, with a gun in her hands? And why shouldn't she? She was smart to be afraid. Smarter would have been to leave him to rot in solitude, not offer him shelter.

Writing down all that he'd remembered and learned so far had painted a picture that he didn't want to see. Even how he had written it was wrong, so wrong, because he wasn't Russian. He was from New York, from Brooklyn, a soldier who had died for his country. That was the story, anyway. But there was no way to reconcile that with the other side of the coin, the master assassin who had changed the world's landscape all for what he had been told was peace and order. Nothing added up to anything even slightly sensible. A loyal solider couldn't serve two masters, and an agent of order couldn't also cultivate chaos and destruction. He couldn't be Sergeant Barnes and the Winter Soldier both. Each was in direct contrast to the other; he could only be one.

Was this his fate, to be torn between two histories and two identities and thus have neither?

His single desire was to forget. But, as he had already come to grips with earlier, there could be no forgetting, no HYDRA to fix him up and restore his ignorance.

The next best thing was staring back him from the barrel of the gun in his hands. If he couldn't forget, then he could sleep.

Sleep would stop the storm, the ache, the rage in his mind. It would erase the pain and the abuse and the blood drenching his hands. If he ceased to exist, then it would all be over. It would be like sleeping in the ice, except this time, he wouldn't be awakened for the sole purpose of shedding more blood.

There would only be sleep.

He closed his eyes, lowering his head slightly, gun pointed at his forehead as his metal fingers crept closer to the trigger. But before he could touch it, a tired and gravelly but still feminine voice interrupted his tentative plan.

"If you're gonna do that, please don't do it in my house."

**A/N: a big thank you to those of you who have read/reviewed/faved/followed this story! You're all the best! And to the reviewer Starlight, I explained the situation with Ruin in the first chapter, but in case you missed it, Ruin is still in the hands of midnightwings96, and the next installment is being worked on right now. This story isn't a sign of Ruin being abandoned. It's still very much alive. And this story here was a relatively brief one to write, already finished and currently in the posting/revising stage. Thank you for reading and for the feedback! And to everybody else, see you all in a few days :D **


	5. Chapter 5

She barely flinched when, clearly out of instinct, he flipped the gun on her. She held up her hands in response, but as soon as the wild look in his eyes calmed a bit, he lowered the gun, and she did the same with her hands. She watched carefully as he stared at the gun, refusing to look up again.

"Go away."

"I mean it," she said. "I'm not cleaning your brains off of my couch."

"Leave me alone."

"Give me the gun and I will."

His eyes suddenly shot up to glare at her from across the room. To be completely honest, she was utterly terrified, but there was no way that she was going to show it. He was clearly especially unstable right now, and one wrong move on her end could end very badly.

"What does killing yourself accomplish?" she asked, swallowing her fear and slowly stepping forward. "Don't you think it would be a waste to survive so much and then take your own life?"

"I shouldn't have survived anything," he half-growled, eyes fixed on the gun. She was halfway to the couch now, and she wasn't sure that he'd even noticed.

"But you did. And now you've gotten away from the bad guys. You shouldn't give up now."

She sat down next to him, carefully, and he continued to not acknowledge her. She took a good look at him - or as much as she could since his hair was blocking most of his face from her view - and frowned at the sweat on his brow and the sharp clench of his jaw. The gun was in his right hand, and his metal one was curled into a fist next to it.

She was truly in over her head. How on earth was she supposed to talk this guy down from the ledge when she completely understood why he'd want to die?

His metal hand unclenched and he dragged those fingers through his hair, gripping a handful of it and closing his eyes. He was mumbling something, she realized, but whatever it was, it wasn't in English.

Her heart was starting to pound, and she was genuinely on the verge of freaking out. On the floor near his feet was the notebook she'd given him, opened to a page that contained a somewhat poor drawing of a bald man with round glasses. Around him were smaller drawings, all rather poorly done - he was clearly never very artistic - but she could tell what the drawings were, except for one that looked like some sort of machinery. The page next to it was scribbled from top to bottom in Russian.

Then she realized that his mumbling had switched back to English. He was still clutching his head, his eyes still squeezed shut, and he was saying "_Hurts, hurts_, _hurts_" over and over.

"What hurts?" she asked softly, keeping one eye on the gun.

"Remembering."

She closed her eyes, trying desperately to think of something, anything, to say that would help to the smallest degree. She knew she was walking a tight line, and anything she said could easily backfire.

Then she had an idea. "Do you want revenge?"

Slowly, his eyes began to open. He didn't look at her, but he did eventually answer. "Yes."

"You can't get revenge if you're dead."

Then he turned his glare upon her. "What do you know about revenge?"

She considered that question for a moment before replying, "Well, if we're talking about hunt-you-down-and-kill-you revenge, nothing. But there's plenty of different ways to get revenge on someone who screwed you over."

When he said nothing and merely kept staring at her, she drew a breath and decided to tell him a story. "My grandmother raised me from the age of six, which is when my parents died in an accident. She was... an amazing lady. She lived in Poland during World War II, and since she and my grandfather were both Jews, they got shipped off to a concentration camp."

He seemed to be paying attention, which she hoped was a good thing.

"Only a few days before the Nazis got them, she had found out she was pregnant. They kept it a secret and just tried to survive in the camp. They were both forced to do manual labor in horrible, disgusting conditions, and one day while they worked, one of the soldiers decided to shoot my grandfather in the head and kill him to motivate the others to work faster." She drew another breath, trying not to forget the point she was planning to make with the story. "She was so thin and underfed that nobody ever noticed that she was pregnant. But she escaped when the Allies came and finally liberated the camp. She came to America and had my mother in a hospital in Virginia."

His expression was becoming confused, and she hurried to make her point. "She had to work three jobs at first to make it, but she did. She never remarried, and she never tried to cover up the identification tattoo that the Nazis gave her. She had her revenge on them by overcoming every obstacle that stood in her way and living, and thriving."

He had looked away a few moments ago, eyes slightly glazed as he was clearly lost in thought. "They told me I was bringing peace and order."

"They told my grandmother's friends that they were taking them for a shower and it turned out to be a gas chamber," she replied. "They were evil. I don't think that you are. If you were, you wouldn't have spent this morning screaming and crying in the forest, and you wouldn't be so desperate right now to make it all stop."

"It doesn't change anything," he muttered.

"Sure it does," she said. "How you react to the bad stuff makes all the difference. Want to hear another story?"

He eyed her wearily, but she started talking before he had a chance to say no.

"The guy used to own that hoodie," she said, pointing to the one he was wearing, "his name is Mark. He's David's father. He was my first real boyfriend. We were dating when I found out my grandma had cancer. Without going into details," she sighed, fiddling with her hands because this topic made her uncomfortable, "he took advantage of me at my most vulnerable. Didn't know what 'no' meant. So I got pregnant with David. Mark said he'd stick around, that we'd try to work it out. That lasted maybe two weeks, mostly because I hated him for what he did. Then I had David, and Mark came around for his visitations until David started getting difficult. Once he got his autism diagnosis, Mark said it was all 'too much' and moved to Texas. All I hear from him now is in the form of his monthly child support check that the court forces him to send us."

James was staring at the gun again, and Summer cleared her throat and added, "Not that our situations are the least bit comparable... but sometimes bad things happen and we have to choose whether to take it and make something good out of it or let it destroy us. My grandma taught me that, and David taught me even more. He's changed my life in the best way possible, but he came from something ugly and horrible."

He gave her a sideways, slightly suspicious look, and asked, "How old are you?"

"Old enough to know what I'm talking about, if that's why you're asking," she shrugged. "How old are you?"

He didn't answer. She knew the answer to that question was extremely complicated. She drew another breath. "I can't imagine what you've been through and the kind of things you're remembering. But the fact that you're alive when the world thought you died in the '40s - and you survived all that happened to you - that's huge. And if you give up, the only ones that win are the ones that drove you to it."

Silence then descended for what felt like an eternity. She didn't speak or move and neither did he, but judging by the look in his eyes, he was fighting a war inside. She didn't know which side was winning until, much later, he wordlessly handed her the gun. She took it, feeling immense relief at the unexpected move, and also unfettered shock that he would give it back to her even if he no longer planned on using it.

"You should try to sleep," she suggested gently. She noticed how he tensed at the word "sleep", and she herself felt a great wave of dread coming on, recalling how the previous night had went. She glanced at him and then, letting her sympathy get the best of her, said, "You could try sleeping in my bed, if you wanted, since I'm not going to."

His eyes met hers, for once not looking at her suspiciously. He looked simply exhausted and lost. She gestured towards the hallway, and then a moment later, she was leading him to her room.

On the way, she almost cracked a joke about it being about time that she finally got a man into her bed, but she didn't feel like dealing with the confused and blank stare that would inevitably cause. So, she kept her jokes to herself and lingered in the doorway of her bedroom as he walked inside of it.

"Just... like I said earlier with the bathroom... please don't destroy anything expensive to fix," she shrugged as he stood in the middle of the room. "And... let me know if you need anything."

He glanced at her over his shoulder and nodded slightly. She wished him a goodnight and closed the door, praying for the rest of the night to be quiet so that she could finally get some sleep.

* * *

Her bed smelled like... flowers.

Lying in her bed, staring at the ceiling above, he tried to think of anything but HYDRA and the fact that an hour earlier he'd been on the verge of suicide. This left him with very little to think about aside from the very floral scent that currently surrounded him. It was strongest on her pillows but also present on the sheets.

It was a pleasant scent. He continued to force himself to focus on it as exhaustion quickly set in, and as he finally manage to drift to sleep, his dreams took him all the way back to the 1940's.

_Giggles filled his ears and the scent of lilac and rose tickled his nose as he kissed soft, eager skin, unable to keep from grinning himself the more the woman laughed and clutched tightly at his uniform._

_"You sure know how to make me blush." the pretty blonde smiled as he pulled away to admire the way she looked pressed against her front door._

_"That'a not all I know how to do," he replied, flashing her a wide, charming smile that made her bite her red lip in response. "Invite me in and I'll show you."_

_Then he kissed her and she moaned in satisfaction, panting as he moved back to her neck. "Oh, what would my mama say..."_

_He chuckled against her skin and then kissed her lips again briefly before asking, "Can I take that as a yes?"_

_She nodded furiously and placed her hand on the doorknob to her left before giggling, "Hurry up before I come to my senses."_

_He laughed and then they tumbled inside her apartment, on the other side of the door was a single room, gray and reeking not of flowers but of antiseptic, and the pretty girl was gone. At the center of the room was a chair that looked like a torture device, and before he could register it, he was suddenly trapped inside of it, under its restraints._

_Voices wafted through his ears, speaking in Russian, and speaking as if he wasn't there as he struggled in vain to free himself._

_"... Good, good. And what of his... basic needs? Food and such?"_

_"We will sustain him on a liquid cocktail of nutrients. This is ideal for one who will be in and out of cryo-freeze. In addition, I have prepared a regimen of injections that will suppress his appetite, stabilize moods, and erase sexual urges. All to keep him focused, you see. The fist of HYDRA will have no distractions."_

_"Excellent. He truly will be the finest soldier this world has ever seen."_

_"Indeed. It is almost a shame that it will never truly see him..."_

_Then the scene changed but his position remained the same, stuck in that hideous chair. He was dazed and terrified, and it took a moment before he recognized a wailing, desperate, pathetic voice as being his own._

_"No... please, no, I remember... you can't do this... please..."_

_His fists clenched under the restraints and sweat poured from him, fueled by panic and dread of the excruciating pain that he knew was coming._

_"What have you done to me? Why?" he cried, every word falling on deaf ears. He stared at everyone in the room, all of the agents and the doctors and suited men, finding not a spark of humanity or concern in any one of their eyes. "Please! Please..."_

_One of the men in suits leaned towards one of the doctors and asked in Russian, "How is it that he remembers? He has even reverted to English."_

_"The machine is only a prototype. I will need to recalibrate. Perhaps the charges are not strong enough for his serum-enhanced brain. I suspect that the effect will never be permanent due to his cell regeneration."_

_"He is of no use to us if he remembers. Fix him. Then put him back on ice."_

_He understood everything they said, and his panic increased tenfold. The last thing that he'd seen in his mind before they'd taken his identity again was a face, a name, one that the thought of forgetting again sent seething anger and utter devastation through his veins._

_Steve was out there somewhere, he told himself as a bite guard was shoved harshly into his mouth and the chair jerked backwards, and Steve had to be looking for him... he had to be... he'd save him again, just like during the first time, and everything would be okay again..._

_Then the machine clamped down on his head, and everything he'd regained of his memory was shattered._

He awoke with a roar, his metal hand clamping on the closest thing it could find - a pillow - and shredding it as dreams gave way to reality. He sat up, breathing heavily and in a cold sweat, brain splitting with pain that made him wince and hold his head with his flesh hand.

Sleep seemed to open the floodgates when it came to fuller, more coherent memories. From the vivid red of the blonde girl's lips to the desperation with which he'd clung to hope that Steve would save him, all of it had been stunningly real and brought back more pain and anger that he didn't want.

Outside the two windows that overlooked the bed, dawn was breaking, illuminating the room just slightly. Letting go of his head, his eyes opened and scanned the room briefly, quickly landing on the notebook that he'd spent the day before writing in.

A few minutes later, he was putting pen to paper again. This time, when Russian started automatically falling from the ink, he glared at the paper and furrowed his brows, concentrating and forcing himself to switch to English.

* * *

Summer awoke with a start when a loud, violent shout came rumbling from her bedroom. David, sleeping with headphones as she had been careful to make sure he did, kept sleeping. She glanced at her phone, sitting next to her on the floor, and groaned when she saw that it wasn't yet six in the morning.

She tried to go back to sleep, but sleeping on the floor wasn't easy. Plus, her nerves were on edge after the sound that woke her up, but on the bright side, at least it hadn't been another night of constant screaming.

Resigned to her fate of not sleeping so long as she was harboring suicidal robo-armed-men, she went about showering and dressing on autopilot, fantasizing about a giant cup of coffee to keep her from nodding off in the process. Once the routine was done and she had acquired said cup of coffee, she sat at her kitchen table, enjoying the brief quiet and solitude, wondering exactly what her long-term plan should be.

He couldn't stay here forever. He needed real help and real therapy, and she could only offer so much of the former and zero of the latter. She was going to have to send him on his way eventually, but where possibly to? For all she knew, the CIA and FBI were all full of HYDRA just like SHIELD had been, and she wouldn't dare turn him in to them. In fact, she couldn't possibly imagine turning him in anywhere, or telling anyone about him.

Tapping her bare foot on the floor, she frowned at her predicament and then at a somewhat sharp jab from something on the floor. She set her cup down and looked under the table, finding one of David's Captain America toys as the culprit. She picked it up and leaned her elbows on the table, idly turning the toy over in her fingers. Maybe that was her answer.

Not that she had the slightest clue of how to go about telling an Avenger that his long lost buddy was hiding out in her house. Plus, who knew if he'd even do anything about it? Maybe under all those Stars and Stripes he was a jerk and wouldn't care.

Highly unlikely, but still.

She brought her cup of coffee to her lips, mulling over her thoughts.

"Can I have some of that today?"

Jumping, she promptly splashed the coffee down the front of her shirt -luckily it was lukewarm by then - and a mangled-sounding cry of surprise left her lips, and all in all, she had no idea which to be more embarrassed about.

"You scared the crap out of me," she protested, looking down at her shirt - which was white - and groaning at its plastered and probably stained state.

"... Sorry."

She looked up at the soldier when he muttered the apology, rolling her eyes to find his gaze glued to her shirt. She stood up, making a beeline for her bedroom. "I'll make us both some when I come back."

Walking into her bedroom, she was briefly taken aback by the sight of one of her pillows lying ripped on her bed. She did a quick inventory of the rest of the room, of what she could see anyway, and everything else seemed intact. One pillow biting the dust wasn't a big deal.

"Sorry about that..."

She jumped and yelped in surprise again, spinning towards her still-open door to find the pillow-demolisher standing awkwardly in the hall. He took a step back at her reaction, looking away and then turning to head back down the hallway.

"It's okay," she said quickly. "It's just a pillow. And I'm sorry I keep jumping, you just... don't make noise when you walk."

He glanced at her and did something with his head that looked like a slight nod or a twitch before walking away fully. She frowned, closing the door and then walking to her closet to grab a new shirt. As obviously deadly as he was, he had a slight wounded puppy-ness to him, almost like if she scolded him enough he'd go scampering ashamedly into a corner. But possibly after punching her first.

By the time she had changed and was ready to venture back out there, her thoughts had drifted to how she was going to manage to keep him occupied all day. She was used to always making sure that David was occupied and content, since that was key to his stability, and she had a feeling James would be the same way. He needed to do more than just sit and stew in his thoughts, lest he be tempted to steal her gun again...

On her way out, a stack of textbooks on top of her dresser caught her eye, and she got an idea.

* * *

When the woman came walking back into the kitchen, he had been staring out her front door, his eyes on the trees and his thoughts far beyond them before the wafting scent of flowers breezed past his nose and stole his attention. It was the same scent that had been on the woman's bed, and her damp hair was radiating the scent as she started bustling about the kitchen.

"So, coffee," she said conversationally, starting to mess with a black machine that must have been her coffeemaker. He watched her from the corner of his eye, trying not to think about the dream that her flowery fragrance had triggered the night before.

"Since this is gonna be your first cup since the dark ages, I'll break out my expensive stuff," she smiled, reaching into the back of a cabinet. He thought about the blonde girl from his dream, wondered if she had been anyone special. His gut told him that she wasn't.

But, thinking about her led to thinking about the rest of the dream, which led to his anger sparking over those Russians casually discussing his systematic dehumanization. His arm was symbolic of the soulless, inhuman tool they'd made him into, depriving him of the most basic of human functions. It made his fist clench, thinking of the extent of their experimentations on him, and to think that he was only scratching the surface of it all...

"James?"

His eyes snapped up to Summer's, and he saw concern and fear in her eyes. He looked down and realized that he appeared ready to head out on the warpath, and his left arm was making clicking and whizzing sounds. He quickly relaxed his hands and drew a breath, and the arm fell silent. He looked back up and found her staring at his arm, half in wonder and half in fear, though all she could see of it was his hand.

"Do you mind if I ask a question about the arm?" she asked. He didn't answer, and she took that as a yes. "Can you... feel with it?"

He nodded. Her eyes widened. "That's... cool. Terrifying, but really cool."

He looked down at his metal hand briefly before shoving it into the hoodie's pocket, out of his sight. When he resumed staring out the window, he heard Summer's voice quietly travel through the room.

"I'm sorry. I talk too much. Just ignore me."

He looked back at her to find her busying herself with the coffeemaker, noting the slight pink on her tan cheeks and embarrassed expression.

He kept staring at her, never bothering to wonder if she noticed or if it would make her uncomfortable. He knew how to observe and read behavior, somehow, but not exactly how to relate to it. She perplexed him greatly. Her kindness and concern made absolutely zero sense, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't make sense of it.

"Okay," she said eventually, two cups in hand, moving towards the table, "Done."

He turned and sat slowly in one of the chairs, a rich, delicious smell flowing from the cups into the air, mixing oddly with another loud whiff of flowers from when she walked past him to sit down herself.

It was all making him a little dizzy.

She pushed one of the cups towards him. "I don't know how you like your coffee and I'm sure you don't either... but I take you to be the typical tough-army-black coffee kind of guy. So here. Give it a try."

For once, he felt no reluctance to take her suggestion, and his first sip of the drink might have been the first real pleasure he'd had since... well, an extremely long time.

The taste didn't trigger any memories, but it tasted familiar enough that he was sure he had drank it before. He glanced up after almost draining the cup in less than a minute to find Summer grinning at him. "Good, right?"

Instead of smiling back or answering, he studied her smile and the way it looked on her face. She made it look so easy to smile, even to smile at him. She treated him like a person and not what he feared he was regardless of how many memories and fragments he recovered of whoever he used to be.

She cleared her throat after a moment but he didn't really notice. His unnerving stare moved to her neck, the side of it that her hair wasn't draped over, and he thought again of the dream, of the blonde girl with the red lips. He thought of the way that she had laughed, and the way that he himself had laughed. Could he laugh now? Was that something he could physically do? What an odd thought, laughing...

"Alright, I'm sorry, but I have to say it - I'm gonna freak out if you keep staring like that."

In an instant, his focus broke and he blinked a couple times before looking away from her and feeling... hot. It took him a moment to recognize the feeling as embarrassment.

"Don't... _crap_," he heard her mutter as he stared at the cup of coffee in front of him. "I'm sorry. I don't want to embarrass you or anything. It's just, you have an extremely intense stare and it's... just... intense."

He nodded, not looking up. "Sorry."

"No, I am," she replied. "I shouldn't have said anything."

He looked up to find the same look on her face as when she'd called his arm "cool". Why did potentially distressing him cause her so much distress?

They sat in silence that was somewhat awkward for a few moments as they both finished off their drinks, and then Summer's voice broke the silence, as usual. "Oh! I found something you might be interested in."

She grabbed a few large books that had been sitting aside on an edge of the table the whole time, and she gently pushed them closer to him. He peered at the cover of the top book as she explained. "I thought you might want to catch up on the last seventy years. I'm doing online college right now, and those are two of my history books. Also, I've got a big bookcase full of all kinds of different books in the living room. It might help if you try to stay... occupied," she finished with a shrug.

As he looked at the books, words flitted quickly through his head - "Your work has shaped the century" - and he then looked away. He didn't want to read about the century, second guessing everything he read and wondering if he'd had a hand in it.

"... But it's up to you. They're there if you want to read them. And like I said, I have plenty of other books."

Far from staring at her, now he refused to look at her at all.

"I'm gonna go wake up David and then make breakfast," she said quietly before getting up and slipping from the room.

While she was gone, he went back and forth between opening the book and ignoring its existence. But eventually, the need to know outweighed the desire not to, and by the time she returned, he was fully engrossed in her history textbooks.

* * *

By the end of the day, Summer was fairly sure that her theory had been correct. Just like David, James needed to stay busy. Sitting it one spot all day thinking of nothing but the terrible deeds he'd done and the abuse inflicted upon him would surely drive anybody to insanity or suicide, or both.

The problem was, he had devoured her offered textbooks in what seemed like the blink of an eye. She had then dug through her book collection, which was a mixture of her grandmother's books and her own, and found a large, dusty book detailing the major battles of World War II. She offered him that one as well, and began wondering what else she could do to keep him occupied.

David was relatively easy in that sense - he had certain activities that he enjoyed, and he liked enjoying them at the same time every day. So long as nothing disrupted that, he was generally fine. But James was not a child, and the thought of managing him the same way she managed David seemed completely impossible. Short of a lot of reading and then maybe convincing him to catch up on seventy years' worth of movies, she had no idea what else to do.

It was late that night, as she cleaned up the kitchen, that she had an idea. She was going to have to go and get more groceries soon - especially since as of that day, he seemed to do fine on a non-bland diet and would soon be depleting her pantry with his suddenly giant appetite - and he couldn't live in one hoodie and one pair of pants.

Ignoring her the urge to panic over the financial aspect of the situation, she glanced into the living room and paused at the deceptively domestic sight of James sitting on her couch, deep into the WWII book, and David sitting on the floor in front of the television, equally engrossed in a movie. Of course, the gun she still carried around all day concealed under her clothes was a stark and annoyingly bulky reminder of the reality of the situation.

"Hey, so," she began quietly, walking into the living room and drawing James' attention from the book, "I'm gonna need to head into town to get more food soon. But I was thinking that I could wait a few days to make sure everything in Washington has died down, and then if you wanted - only if you wanted - I could take you to a place there."

His eyes widened and he looked as if he was about to panic, so she raised her hands and quickly added, "Just for like an hour or so. It's a place that has a big exhibit about Captain America, and you're in it too. I've taken David there twice before, so I've seen it."

The panic slowly left his eyes, and conflict replaced it.

"It's up to you. Honestly, I'm just improvising here. I don't know what'll help you and what won't... but it'll give you a chance to see what you were before..." she shrugged, not knowing how to end that statement and knowing she didn't really need to. When he didn't answer, she walked over to the television and turned it off, taking David's hand and glancing again to the man on her couch. "Just think about it. You don't have to do anything you don't want to."

Then she headed out of the room, leaving him to sit there and think while she got herself and her son ready for bed. She knew that leaving him to think was dangerous, but when David had fallen asleep that night, she briefly left his room and peeked out into the living room to find it vacant. She then walked to her bedroom door and saw the light on through the cracks in it. Hoping that the rest of her pillows survived the night, she trudged back to David's room, ready for another night of no sleep.

**A/N: so a little bit of backstory here for the OC, and some family history. Next chapter will mark the halfway point for the story. Thank you to everyone who has reviewed and faved and read, I know I say this every time and it may be slightly repetitive but you're all the best and I thank you very much for taking the time to read and then taking extra time to let me know what you think :D **


	6. Chapter 6

It only took James a day to accept Summer's invitation to the Smithsonian. By the time she started thinking of the logistics of the trip, she realized it was a much bigger task than she'd first considered. First, taking him there was in itself risky, for obvious reasons, and second, if she was caught helping him, it suddenly dawned on her how much legal trouble she'd be in. She could turn into one of those people who disappear into thin air and end up fodder on conspiracy websites.

Her solution to that problem was to suggest to James as they ate dinner one night that they try to disguise him. But the moment she'd suggested cutting his hair, he expressed such vehement opposition that she decided to never mention it again, chalking it up to him simply not wanting anyone with sharp objects coming near him. Understandable.

Then there was David to consider. Five hours in the car round-trip would be pushing his limits, and she began imagining worst-case scenarios where David would end up melting down in the car, James wouldn't be able to handle it, and then it would be metal-arm-to-both-of-their-faces time.

But, day to day, things were relatively stable. He and David usually ignored each other, and on the occasions that David would act highly out of character and try to engage him with a toy, James would take it and wait until the boy moved on to something else to give it back. So, despite the horror scenarios she was good at dreaming up, nothing had happened to make them seem at all likely.

So, despite the potential disasters, she kept her word to James, and a full nine days after he arrived so unceremoniously in her life, she loaded he and David in her truck for a mini-road trip.

David, dressed festively in a Captain America t-shirt (which she could almost feel James actively ignoring), settled in his car seat in the back of her truck with his tablet while James sat in the front, looking for all the world like a slightly redneck, run of the mill guy who had probably never read the news in his life, let alone influenced it.

Summer got behind the wheel and closed the door, stealing a glance at James and feeling self-congratulatory for managing to pick out clothes that actually fit him the day before. She'd nearly had a heart attack leaving him at home alone to get groceries and other necessities from town, but she'd done it and at least he now had more than one outfit. Today he was dressed in dark jeans, a black t-shirt, flannel shirt over that and a gray jacket, and her brilliant disguise for him consisted of a hat that was jammed on top of his head. She'd tried to get him to at least put some of his hair up, but he seemed particularly aghast at that suggestion, maybe even more so than when she'd offered to cut it.

"All right," she said, turning on the ignition, glancing at him again. "Still want to do this?"

He answered with a nod, and she looked back at David one more time before backing out of her gravel driveway.

The first hour of the drive to D.C. was similar to every day at home - James reading, David occupied, and Summer left to herself. In a bid to ease her boredom and slight anxiety, she flipped on the radio, forgetting that her passenger hadn't heard music in seven decades.

When a hip hop song came on that she was fairly sure was called "Sex &amp; Drugs" - literally, just that - she reached to turn it off, only to catch the priceless expression on her passenger's face. He stared at the radio with a slightly horrified and wholly confused expression, and she couldn't help but laugh. The sound made him snap his eyes to her, and she could only laugh harder.

"What... is that?"

Trying desperately hard not to snort, she contained her laughter long enough to reply, "That is one of this year's most popular songs."

"That's... music? They aren't singing..."

She shook her head, still smiling broadly. "Nope. They're rapping." When that inspired only more confusion, she elaborated, "Um... talking fast and rhyming words. This song is terrible, but there's some good rappers out there. This was a horrible way to be introduced to current music, though. Sorry about that."

Still fighting another laugh, she started scanning through other stations, but James' kept his wide-eyed expression long after the song was over. She glanced at him and smiled. "If you think the song was bad, you should see the video for it. You might have a heart attack. Pretty much anything goes these days."

Suddenly she imagined what kind of shock he'd be in if he walked into a nightclub and saw what young adults did attract one another on a routine basis, and she laughed again. He half-glared at her from the corner of his eye, and she bit her lip to stop laughing.

"Sorry."

Eventually, she settled on plugging her phone in and playing a Beatles album, not wanting to permanently scar him with terrible current songs. She almost offered to find some music from the 30's or 40's for him, but then she thought it might trigger some memories, and she didn't necessarily wish for that to happen at that particular time. She left the Beatles on, briefly explained how pivotal they were to music in general, and then they both fell back into silence. She focused on the road, and he on a book in his lap.

About an hour outside of D.C., a thought occurred to Summer. "How did you get to my house? Did you walk the whole way?"

He paused reading and nodded.

"You must walk fast," she remarked. Then she realized how stupid of a comment that was. Of course he walked fast. She'd seen footage of Captain America running during the disaster in Manhattan, and he'd looked as if he could outrun a car.

"I didn't even see your house," he said, unexpectedly. "I didn't mean to pass out there."

Accustomed to shrugs, nods, and one-word answers, Summer quickly masked her surprise and nodded in response. "Well, lucky for you that you did. Most people aren't so welcoming to bleeding strangers. Where had you been trying to go?"

He shrugged. "Anywhere."

She frowned at that, unable to truly wrap her mind around his situation. It really was incomprehensible, and she only knew the most basic of the details.

"Well," she sighed, "I want you to know that I appreciate how you've respected what I've asked from you. I was scared out of my mind when I decided to let you stay, but half the time I barely know you're there. So, thank you."

His brows furrowed and his eyes fell to his lap. He didn't answer, and she hadn't really expected him to. A thank you of his own would have been nice, considering that she'd taken money from precious savings to buy him clothes and was sharing her food with him, but she also had come to realize that he had little more social skills than David. He was often rude without realizing, slightly creepy at times with his intense, constant staring, and it would be easy to think him ungrateful by his lack of expressed appreciation. But it was more than easy to forgive his oddities and write them off as symptoms of whatever it was that he had endured at the hands of HYDRA.

Plus, she was used to silence and "abnormal" behavior from those she cared for. She knew how to accept a person for who they were and adapt her expectations to accommodate that.

"So... anyway," she said, lightening the mood, "you hungry?"

* * *

This woman was starting to unnerve him.

He nodded a yes to her question, but her previous words of gratitude had sparked a dull headache. The longer that he lived with her, ate her food, read her books, and slept on her bed, the more he anticipated his luck running out and the woman coming to her senses. And he still refused to believe that anything other than fear was the reason why she was tolerating him and now driving him to a museum nearly three hours away.

But there were times when he'd watch her interacting with her son, and it could be the most mundane of things like handing the child a cup of water or wiping his face, but sometimes he'd see a flash in his memory of a woman - the same woman he'd recalled a fragment of in the forest - and he was starting to suspect that the woman had been his own mother. But memories from before his fall were harder to drag into the light than the ones that came after; that was one of the reasons why he'd agreed to come today. If he really had been an honorable, well-loved soldier in that lifetime, then he'd rather remember those days than the ones that dominated his dreams at night.

Nonetheless, he was growing ever more skeptical of Summer's good intentions. Helping him for no reason made no logical sense. Nobody ever did anything expecting nothing in return. There was always a reason, a motivation, a goal in mind.

At least that's what he believed, due to experience, and it was easier to believe than her doing it all simply because she somehow thought he deserved the help. The very thought of that being true caused waves of discomfort and guilt that he couldn't fully explain.

About half an hour from their destination, Summer had stopped and gotten food from what she called a "drive thru". It was good in an odd sort of way that left him vaguely nauseous afterwards. Everything he ate tended to do that. Except coffee. That he would happily live on.

Once they got into the greater D.C. area, he kept his eyes down and didn't look up or out once. It wasn't for fear of being recognized through the truck's windows, but for fear of what he may recall from seeing the various buildings and sights. It wasn't long before the truck came to a halt, and the sound of Summer's seatbelt unbuckling roused him from his thoughts.

"Ready?" she asked him, dark brown hair falling around her face in contrast to the usual ponytails she wore in her home. She was also dressed better than usual, in a blue sweater and jeans, but he hadn't really registered that. He nodded, and she gave him a small smile that he assumed was meant to be encouraging before getting out.

Hands shoved in his jacket pockets, he walked slightly behind the two as they walked to the museum, keeping his head down while also scanning the perimeter and making note of every man, woman, and child that was there. It came as natural as breathing.

After Summer paid the fees for them to enter, he vaguely registered her panicking at his left side about metal detectors beyond the doors. He just shrugged and kept walking while she nearly became hysterical.

When he walked past the detectors without so much as a blip on the radar, he glanced back to find her in utter shock with a dropped jaw. Then she rushed to catch up with him.

"What is that thing made of?" she asked in a whisper.

He shrugged. "I don't know. It might just be wired to be undetectable."

She let out a deep breath. "I was seriously panicking." When he gave her a sidelong look, she narrowed her eyes and muttered, "Don't judge me. I'm new to this stuff."

After that, he let her play guide and followed her, since she knew where they were going and he didn't. A giant mural painting of Captain America on a wall told him when they'd arrived.

The exhibit was packed, filled with people who didn't seem to care much about the recent chaos in the city. David was one of quite a few kids there who were decked out in clothes depicting their hero, even girls, and he tried not to acknowledge the conflicted feelings this brought from within. There was no greater web of confused and tangled, fragmented knots amid his dreams and memories than Steve Rogers.

Once, after they'd moved past the first mural, he'd noticed that Summer, walking slightly ahead, reached back towards him as if to hold his hand or arm as they went, but she instantly drew back and seemed to think better of it.

In the heart of the exhibit was the beginning of the story, the origins of the world's first superhero, and a display that made him stop and look closely. Seven figures, displaying the uniforms of the Howling Commandos and their leader, and behind them, another huge mural, of all of them. He stared at it, at a face that looked a lot like the one he saw in the mirror and yet, at the same time, nothing like it.

The other faces all tugged at his mind, at a place buried so deeply that he had to second guess if it was even real. Then there was another tug, this time a physical one from a cautious hand on his elbow, and he turned his head to find Summer gently leading him to the right.

"Yours is over here," she said, letting go once he saw the display in question. "Sorry, I just... don't think you should stay in one spot for too long. The hat and the scruff only do so much to hide you."

He barely heard what she was saying, because all of his attention focused on the glass black and white display that was meant as a sort of memorial to him. He walked up close to it, reading line by line the story of his life. Born and raised in Brooklyn, best friend of Steve Rogers since childhood, Sergeant of the 107th, captured by HYDRA and subsequently rescued by Rogers, going on to join the Commandos and giving his life in service to his country.

It was the same story he'd read on Summer's computer, but seeing it here, seeing himself here, portrayed as a hero that had made the ultimate sacrifice... it made him desperately want to believe it.

As he stood there, staring at who he'd once been, he tried to search beneath the surface, to draw out the memories from that life that he knew were still in there, somewhere. Somewhere there was more than fragments, more than haunting flashes or brief scenes that told him nothing of who he really was...

Lost in concentration, he didn't see a little girl come barreling into his legs from out of nowhere. He jumped from the collision and tensed as if preparing to fight before he looked down and saw the little girl - around six or seven, long blonde hair, big blue eyes and an embarrassed smile.

One look at her face, and he was knee deep in a memory from long after his supposed death.

"Sorry mister!" she chirped before racing off after a couple of other kids, leaving him there to stare where she had stood, eyes wide and face paling.

_Seven years old, long blonde hair, big blue eyes, and a big happy smile was what he saw through the scope of his gun. An innocent little girl in her parents' backyard, flanked by her happy parents and surrounded by her small friends, gathered to celebrate her birthday. She was his mission. He didn't know why. He wasn't supposed to know why. He was simply supposed to pull the trigger._

_He didn't have a clear shot until she was seated at a picnic table, drawing a deep breath to blow out the seven candles on her birthday cake. Before she could extinguish the flame, a silent shot rang out, a pink party hat was stained with blood, screams filled the air, and his mission was complete. _

His blood ran cold, nearly cold enough to freeze him all over again, and he couldn't breathe. Any horror or shame that he'd felt so far paled in comparison to what he felt in that moment.

_Why?_ Why would they order him to kill a little girl, an innocent child, on her birthday?

How could he do it, regardless of what they'd done to him? How had his humanity not awoken and stopped him from doing it?

"James?... Are you okay?"

When he felt the hand cautiously touch his right arm, he whipped around and glared at the newly reappeared Summer with his darkest, most threatening stare that he could manage in that moment. Fists clenched inside of his pockets, he knew that he had to get out of there, and get as far away as possible.

"Don't touch me," he growled as menacingly as he possibly could before storming past her, not registering how his left shoulder smacked into her right one in the process.

* * *

She'd seen it written on his face, but she didn't know what it was or what the cause of it was. His eyes had been wild, wide, and full of unshed tears, and she'd never seen him so pale or horrified looking. Even when he'd been toying with her gun as he pointed it at himself, he hadn't looked anything like that.

His admonishment to not touch him was met by her hands going up in surrender, and then his left shoulder had shoved right into her right one, and it had almost knocked her off of her feet. She clutched at her shoulder, her other hand gripping David's, and she turned to watch him leave the exhibit in a rush.

It was official - she had the worst ideas ever.

Now she had a whole new dilemma, and very nearly a dislocated shoulder. Did she go after him or did she just wait him out? If she went with the latter, and he didn't come back at all, did she just drive home and celebrate life going back to normal?

Rolling her eyes at her own predictable decision, she tugged David's hand. "Come on, sweetie. Let's go make sure he's okay."

She took a step forward, but David wouldn't budge. She tugged again and looked down at him, face stern. "Come on. Now. I'm serious."

A high pitched whine from closed lips was her first hint that this wasn't going to end well. And it didn't.

By the time she got to her truck, James was nowhere in sight and David was screaming, thrashing, and attracting the attention of every noisy bystander in the vicinity. She sighed, cursing the timing of it all and ignoring the judgmental stares ,and picked him up in her arms before jumping in the backseat of her truck with him.

When he did this, she had to physically hold him in a sort of bear hug on steroids to keep him from hitting himself or destroying whatever was in front of him. She held him on her lap, holding his arms down across his chest and locking his legs between her own, keeping her head angled as far back as possible in case he decided to throw his head backwards and smash it into her face, which had happened before. If she didn't do this, he would end up bleeding or bruised from hitting himself or flailing into something, and it would go on indefinitely until he either wore out or passed out. But, by keeping him restrained, he wouldn't end up hurt, and the fit would end in hopefully fifteen minutes or so.

She didn't know how she'd do this when he was bigger, but for now, it worked.

Twenty minutes passed before he stopped, and in five more, he was asleep. She placed him into his car seat and buckled him in, kissing his forehead and wishing she'd just thought of his needs first and stayed in the stupid museum.

A moment later, she was back in the driver's seat, taking a deep breath and wondering how hard it was going to be to find a man who was undoubtedly extremely skilled at hiding when he did not want to be found.

For the first hour of driving, she was reservedly optimistic. Surely he wouldn't have gone that far, and surely whatever had happened wasn't so dramatic to make him abandon his only source of food and shelter. She expected to see him wandering aimlessly down a street or huddled against a wall somewhere, but by the second hour, she was losing hope.

The devil on her shoulder - the one she was fairly sure was already an ugly purple thanks to Mr. Terminator-Arm - told her to thank her lucky stars and hit the gas. But she knew she'd pay that voice no mind.

Mark used to tell her that she was the dumbest smart person he knew. She was starting to think he may have been on to something.

Two and a half hours into her search, she ended up parking behind some random building and slumping forward, forehead to her steering wheel, feeling hopeless. She had about as much of a chance finding him as she did winning some enormous lottery. Maybe less.

That was why she screamed a little when her passenger door suddenly opened and the subject of her search causally climbed in, shutting the door and staring ahead through the windshield, like his sudden appearance was no big deal. She stared at him, holding a hand to her chest and catching her breath, looking him over and trying to gauge his current state.

Red, puffy eyes told her that he'd been crying, but the set of his jaw told her that he was angry. The stone-still way that he sat and pointed refusal to look at her told her that he was most certainly not going to talk about it.

Fair enough. Letting him be, she shifted gears and headed back to Virginia.

* * *

It had been easy enough to pass through the city, undetected, and find an empty alleyway to fall apart in. He'd thrown up twice along the way, as was becoming the tradition, and no matter what he did, he couldn't get the image of that little girl and her blood-splattered pink party hat out of his head.

Sitting in that alleyway, he stopped trying to understand and gave in to the waves of hatred that he couldn't hope to stop. Most of it was aimed at himself, but his anger at HYDRA was starting to spiral out of control. All of the lies he'd been fed about peace and order, and how he was so instrumental in making the world a better place, and yet they'd sent him to kill a kid. On her birthday, in front of her family and friends.

Undoubtedly, he deducted, one of her parents must have been important to HYDRA. He was never sent to kill someone at random, never, and only the most important targets were assigned to him.

The soldier that he'd seen at the museum, who was honored and memorialized by his country that he'd served and sacrificed for, wouldn't have done what he did. He would have thrown himself in front of the bullet to save the child, not be the one to fire it. There was no reconciling the two opposite ends of the spectrum, no sense to be made of any of it.

Then something he'd been told recently ran through his head. Something along the lines of, if he was truly evil, he wouldn't be so desperate and broken from remembering what he'd done. Maybe she was right. Maybe the misery and shame and devastation that he felt was the evidence of a lingering shred of humanity that they hadn't taken from him.

Maybe he could still have revenge. He could hunt them all down one by one, what was left of HYDRA, and take comfort in spraying the walls with their blood. Maybe that was the answer, the way to make his head stop screaming.

He'd seen Summer's truck circle the alley no less than six times, and on the seventh time, she'd stopped a bit up the street. That was when he got up and marched up and out of the alley, to the passenger door, determined to channel all of the confusion and guilt into anger that he'd resolve in time, through vengeance.

He didn't say a word to Summer during the entire ride home, and she didn't say a word to him. He had a feeling that his days living on her kindness were growing swiftly numbered.

* * *

Back home, the sun had long since set, and all David wanted to do was retreat to the haven of his room. James made a similar beeline for her room, and Summer rolled her eyes at again being the one stuck awkwardly on the outside with nothing to do.

Eventually, she ended up in the bathroom, taking her sweater off and moving the thin strap of her white tank aside to get the full view of her new bruise. It was as big and ugly as she'd predicted it would be. Making a mental note to give James an extra wide berth at all times from now on, lest he take her arm off next time, she washed her hands and then headed out of the bathroom, only to stop short to avoid smacking into the guy she'd just vowed to never ever accidentally touch again.

"Sorry," she muttered, almost laughing at how far he jumped back, also trying to avoid her. But she hadn't taken two steps down the hall before she felt a hand on her upper arm - a flesh hand, thankfully - and then she was spun around. He was staring at the bruise on her shoulder with highly confused eyes.

Then he dropped his hand quickly, too quickly, and he glanced up at her eyes before asking quietly, "Who did that to you?"

"... You did," she answered quietly. The confusion on his face grew, and she explained, "When you left the exhibit. Your shoulder hit me, that's all. I know you didn't mean to."

Recognition dawned on his face, and he looked genuinely apologetic for a moment. She spoke up before he could say he was sorry.

"It was an accident. I get it. It's just a bruise. Don't worry about it."

She expected him to look away, maybe stare at his feet and nod, or just shuffle away. When he just maintained eye contact instead, she started to squirm a little.

"... Anyway. I have to write a paper, or try to, so... uh... goodnight," she said, eager to look at anything else in the world besides his eyes. She was developing an irrational fear of exploding or suffocating if she looked at them too long.

Her hand was on the knob of David's door when she was once again caught extremely off guard.

"Summer?"

She turned and looked back to him, realizing it was the first time he'd ever said her name. "Yeah?"

He seemed to be struggling slightly, like he was about to say something difficult, but she had a feeling she knew what he was going to say. After a moment, he again looked her in the eyes and said quietly, "Thank you."

She'd been right. She couldn't help but smile in response. Maybe she did need to hear those words every so often after all. "You're welcome. And... I'm sorry about today. My ideas are just the worst, I guess."

He shook his head. "It wasn't that."

"Oh. Well... whatever happened, I'm glad you came back."

He didn't say anything to that, and then she started feeling squirmy again. She was fairly sure that if Superman existed - and heck, maybe he did, if all these other freaks did - his laser vision wouldn't be half as intense as this guy's normal eye contact. Maybe if he just smiled on occasion, or blinked, or stared at something besides her, it wouldn't be so unnerving...

Unable to take it anymore, she said goodnight again, and then fled into David's room. Closing the door behind her, she winced at her awkward exit but felt immediate relief at being out from under his sight. David looked up from his toys on the floor, smiled and held out a Hulk action figure towards her. She smiled, decided to ignore her pounding heart and under no circumstances try to analyze it, and opted instead to sit on the floor and play with Avengers toys to end what had been kind of a horrible day.

And if the "thank you" she'd gotten had made it all suddenly seem extremely worthwhile and totally doable, then at least there was that, and she'd enjoy it while it lasted.

**A/N: Not too much to say here today, aside from my usual big thanks and hugs to everyone reading and following and reviewing this story. You're all the best and I'll see you in a few days with the next chapter :)**


	7. Chapter 7

Another few days passed, and the routine seemed to be holding. The days were still mostly silent, the nights less so, and the only thing that really changed was the size of Summer's guest's appetite.

Having fully overcome his initial inability to eat much of anything, he now ate like a horse. And that gave her a whole new matter to panic about.

After watching him put away four platefuls of dinner, Summer gathered up the dishes and went about her normal cleaning routine while furiously adding up the numbers in her head. Put simply, if he stayed indefinitely and kept eating at his current rate, she'd go broke feeding him in a short matter of time.

She understood that he couldn't do anything about it, what with his super-soldier metabolism (or at least that's what she read on the Internet about Steve Rogers), so there was nothing to be done about it. She couldn't put him on rations, but since she and David survived on savings, student loans, and child support, she was in no position to feed a bottomless pit.

She had one plate down and on the drying rack and was wracking her brain to come up with an estimate of when she could expect destitution when a sudden presence to her left made her stop and look up. James stood there, eyes on the sink, looking a bit awkward, and she flipped off the tap.

"Need something?"

"I thought... I could do that, if you wanted."

She blinked, glanced at the sink, and then back to him. "The dishes?" When he nodded slightly, she blinked again and asked, "Do you know... how?"

"I've watched you do them for two weeks," he replied, somewhat deadpan.

"Oh." She shifted slightly. Of course he had. He watched her do everything. "Okay. Um... sure. Thanks."

She then handed him the sponge, and a few moments later, she stood and watched in slight bewilderment as a metal-armed assassin washed dishes in her sink. She had the sudden urge to snap a picture of the spectacle, but then her better judgment kicked in.

David was at the table, coloring in a book, and Summer fidgeted for a moment, unsure of what to do now that she couldn't occupy herself with cleaning. She ended up sitting down next to David and getting on her phone, opening up her calculator app and deciding to go back to stressing about money.

Halfway through her calculations, an incoming call from her brother interrupted. As the room filled with the chorus of Weird Al's "White and Nerdy", she glanced up at James and then cleared her throat before answering.

"Hi Paul," she said lightly, reminding herself to sound as normal as possible and not give anything away about her current weird situation.

"Hey kid," came his reply. "You haven't been answering my texts. Why do you hate me?"

She snorted. "Sorry. I've been busy."

"With what? Writing one paper a week and mopping?"

"Hey," she feigned offense, "I'll have you know that I've cleaned the windows too."

"Seriously, I get worried when you don't answer like usual. Pretty soon you'll stop answering me altogether and never leave the house and end up like that weird uncle we never met who was dead in his house for a year before anyone noticed."

"Ew," she crinkled her nose. "Thanks for that, by the way. Real vote of confidence."

"Well. You're all alone out there. My offer still stands."

She sighed. "I know. And I appreciate it. But I hate California and it's better for David like this."

"Maybe. Well, if you won't come move in with us, I'm gonna sign you up for online dating. Or maybe FarmersOnly, since you're all into that organic crap -"

Her eyes widened. "Paul. No. I'm serious. I will send you a bomb if you do that." James glanced at her from the sink, and when she felt her face heat up a little, she attributed it to her outrage at Paul's idea.

"Oh come on! It's been what, almost six years - you need a date. With someone who won't knock you up and then split."

She grit her teeth. "He didn't knock me up, he -"

"I know. Sorry. But still. You need a date."

"And who would watch David while I'm on this date?" Another glance from the sink, and she stared down at her hand resting on the table.

"I don't know - take him with you. You know that there's plenty of single dads with autistic kids who are in the same boat as you, I bet you could even do a search based on that, and -"

"Gah, Paul, enough," she half-whined. Done with the dishes, James lingered for a moment and then wandered off to her bathroom. She sighed at his exit. "Besides, I'd probably just meet a serial killer, or an ax murderer." Or an ex-HYDRA agent, as she was decent at finding those, apparently.

"That is an unfair stereotype and you know it."

"Don't care."

On the other end, Paul let out a lengthy sigh as he paused. "How are you on money?"

She cringed but replied, "I'm doing fine."

"Sold any articles lately?"

"No," she sighed. "Not a whole lot of freelance stuff available at the moment."

"And your book?"

She cringed again. "Yeah, about that..."

"Of course," he snorted. "Are you ever going to put your talent to actual good use?"

"What do you think I'm doing in school?" she shot back slightly defensively, leaning back in her chair and tipping it back slightly.

"Getting in debt, mostly."

She leaned back further and crossed her arms, balancing the phone between her neck and shoulder. "Well, you're just a ray of sunshine today. Did you call just to get on my nerves and freak me out?"

"Why else do I ever call?" he replied. "No. I just don't like you being all the way over there alone. Especially that close to D.C.. And I know you feel like you need to live there because Grandma left you the place, but -"

"No I don't," she protested quickly.

"Whatever. But seriously, Summer! All that crap with SHIELD and HYDRA and our secretly Nazi government - if that's not reason enough to leave that area, I don't know what is."

She couldn't help it - she laughed. And she kept laughing until she bordered on hysteria and nearly tipped over her chair in the process. It was just too much, what with a HYDRA relic living under her roof and all. She balanced the chair at the last minute, and tried to contain her laughter.

"You're losing it, aren't you? I'm calling the men in white coats because apparently you think Nazis are a laugh riot."

"I don't," she said, forcing a deep breath to calm her laughter down. "I don't. Never mind. You wouldn't get it if I tried to explain."

"That, I believe," he muttered. "By the way, I think Sarah's pregnant again."

Her eyes widened. "What? Are you guys trying to be the Duggars 2.0?"

"Kind of," he replied. "Why not? And this would only make seven."

She rolled her eyes. "Poor Sarah. You're such a Catholic."

"Don't mock my Irish blood. It's not my fault that your portion of it from Dad is invisible."

She snorted. "Ginger."

"You wish you had my rugged Ron Weasley looks."

She wrinkled her nose again. "Okay, those words don't even work in a sentence together. I'm glad you got all those genes and I got the actual good ones."

Paul gave a laugh to that one. "Who knew kids so pasty could be so diverse?"

"Speak for yourself, Casper," she replied, hearing the bathroom door open from down the hall. She glanced up and then froze at the sight of her houseguest, this time wholly fulfilling the romantic-comedy cliche and exiting the bathroom wet and clad only in a towel that hung low on his hips.

He walked straight from the bathroom to her bedroom, which was only a number of feet directly in front of it, but she watched in what seemed like slow motion, feeling like somebody had lit matches underneath her cheeks. And then, to her undying, eternal shame, once he'd disappeared inside of her room, her balancing act with the chair failed spectacularly, and it fell backwards, sending her tumbling stupidly to the floor.

Grumbling incoherently about towels and cliches and muscles, she grabbed her phone off of the floor and sat up with a groan. "Dang it."

"Did you just die?"

"Almost," she sighed, fixing the chair and climbing back in it. Even David had stopped what he was doing and was looking at her as if she had two heads. "Stop judging me, David."

"Tell him Uncle Paul says hi."

"Uncle Paul says hi, David," Summer told the boy, who then turned back to his coloring. "He'd say hi back if he could."

"I know. I miss that kid."

"I miss your little brats too."

"Which is why they should all live together."

She laughed. It was a terrible idea. "That's my cue to hang up."

"Yeah, yeah. Answer my texts better from now on."

"Sure thing, No-Soul."

"Whatever, you... you... I don't know. Natalie Portman."

She squinted. "Is that supposed to be even remotely insulting?"

"Shut up. FarmersOnly."

"Letter bomb," she reminded him before hanging up. Talking to her older brother had left her smiling for a moment or two, but then it became a frown when she realized that this was the first thing she'd ever hidden from him. She'd never lied to him or concealed anything from him until now.

Sighing, she was lost in thought for a moment before glancing over and realizing David wasn't in his chair anymore. He was digging in her lower kitchen cabinets, and when she opened her mouth to ask what the heck he was doing, he triumphantly pulled out a package of aluminum foil.

"What are you doing with that?" she asked as he bustled over to the table, set it down, and then got back into his chair with a smile on his face. He then pushed it towards her expectantly, and she stared at him in confusion. "I don't get it..."

Then David shoved out his left arm, and she suddenly understood. "Oh. Oh... you want... I get it. Um... okay."

Hesitantly, she opened the package and ripped off a sheet of the foil. She wasn't sure that this was the greatest idea, but she couldn't say no to him, so she ended up making him a full fake metal arm out of aluminum foil, complete with tiny strips she wrapped around his fingers.

Once it was done, she thought it looked kind of terrible, but David was thrilled. Earlier she'd caught a glimpse of one of his drawings, and there was no mistaking who the silver-armed figure was supposed to be. They barely interacted, so she didn't understand where all of this was coming from, but then maybe that was it. They were, oddly enough, rather alike at the present time, and even if they weren't, a guy with a robot arm would probably be super cool to a little boy automatically anyway.

It figured, she mused, watching David wave his arm around with a big smile on his face. All this time she'd sworn off dating for his sake, not wanting to confuse him with men coming and going from his life, and he was probably getting attached to one anyway. And she didn't even get the benefit of dating out of the deal. Depressing.

She watched him get down and play with the new fake arm, a smile on her face as she did, and then all too soon, -Silent-Ninja-Footsteps walked into the kitchen from the hallway. He didn't look at either of them, heading to her living room, presumably for another book, but David apparently wasn't having it. He jogged into the living room after him, and Summer got up, biting back the urge to chew her nail as she followed.

She was right about the books, because James was standing in front of her bookcase, and David was standing at his direct left, holding out his left arm proudly, waiting for the soldier to take notice.

When he did, he slowly looked over the foil, from shoulder to the little fingers she'd made, and then he looked up at David's eyes, and then finally Summer's.

She couldn't quite discern the look in his eyes, but whatever it was, it made her heart feel heavy.

* * *

His first gut reaction was to assume that the boy was somehow mocking him. There was a memory somewhere to blame, something involving a guard, or several, and snide comments that he could probably remember if he tried hard enough to.

But then he'd looked in the child's eyes, and all he saw there was innocence and pride. There was no trace of mocking, derision, nothing that could possibly be taken as anything negative.

It hit him like a punch to the stomach.

He looked up at the boy's mother then, and she was looking on with a slightly nervous smile. Probably worried about his reaction, but she didn't look fearful. In fact, she hadn't looked afraid of him for awhile now. He'd also noticed that she didn't carry around her gun around the house 24/7 anymore.

Breaking him out of his thoughts, David giggled and then ran out of the room. He blinked and glanced again at Summer, who had let out a small laugh.

"He made me make him that," she explained. "He was very excited about it."

He didn't know how to process it. He felt uncomfortable, but he couldn't pinpoint exactly why. His throat felt odd, like there was a lump in it, and swallowing didn't help.

"Also," she said before briefly stepping away and then reappearing, "He drew this earlier."

She held out a piece of paper to him, and he took it. He looked it over, seeing a lot of random things - a Captain America shield, a big green fist, some unrelated things like trucks and what appeared to be a worm or snake, and then, rather prominently near the center of the page, a man with long brown hair and a silver arm.

He felt like he'd been punched again.

"He's taken quite a liking to you, I guess," she smiled.

He gave the paper back to her wordlessly, stumped as to what to possibly say. Then he turned back towards the bookcase, looking at the titles but not seeing them. It would take him awhile to mentally work through what he'd just seen.

"Hey, if you're getting sick of reading," he heard her voice pipe up again, "I could put a movie in. If you wanted."

He turned his head, looking at her again, and she started fidgeting with her hands. She'd been doing that a lot lately, and avoiding eye contact if she could help it. He remembered her comment about his staring, so he tried to not do it as much, but he usually wasn't aware that he was doing it until she started squirming.

"And I could make coffee."

He must have visibly warmed up to the idea, because she laughed softly.

"Okay. Give me five minutes, and I'll make it and then put something in."

When she turned and left, she did it with enough of a flourish to make the scent of her hair hit his nose. Her sheets and pillows didn't smell like it anymore, but the scent still followed him around in moments like these, and it was calming, like the smell of coffee. It was becoming familiar, which was significant when so few things were.

In less than the promised five minutes, he found himself sitting on her couch, coffee in hand and sitting on one side while she sat on the other, practically smashed against the arm. Even he thought it was strange to sit that far away from someone, and that was saying something.

"So, before I start the movie," she said, "I was wondering - do you know yet how long you're gonna need to stay here?" When he instantly frowned, she quickly added, "It's not that I don't want you to stay - I do - I mean, I want you to do whatever you want to do, and I want to help you."

His brows furrowed. She was talking faster than usual and openly cringing at her own word choices.

"It's just that since you've started eating more, you've been kind of destroying my food supply. And I get it, you've got to eat a lot - and I'm glad you're feeling better and not throwing everything up. But I'm on a fixed income, sort of, and I can't feed you like this for much longer."

He nodded. He'd never stopped to wonder how the woman supported herself, or think twice about money at all. Now he felt like an idiot.

"I don't know," he replied after a brief silence.

"I don't want you to think I'm pushing you out, because I'm not," she replied. "I can get by for awhile if I buy really cheap stuff in bulk. I can adjust what I spend and make it, for awhile, at least."

Truthfully, he wanted to get out and get started on what he'd set his mind to a few days earlier at the Smithsonian - taking revenge on HYDRA. But he didn't know where to start, and trying to comb through his porous, unreliable memories to remember faces and places was difficult at best. He needed an actual plan, especially considering HYDRA agents had tried to execute him multiple times between the helicarrier incident and his arrival here. He could not, unfortunately, just run out and start hunting the rats down with no contingency plans.

"So, don't worry about it," she said, drawing him back out of his thoughts. "I'll figure it out. I just didn't know if you had any plans or not. I'm not trying to rush you or anything."

The more she spoke, the more she seemed to become frustrated with herself. Her cheeks had a twinge of pink to them, and he didn't catch himself to stop from staring. The longer he looked, the more the color grew, and he didn't realize that his staring was the cause of it.

Then there was a loud knocking at the front door, and she jumped in surprise. He narrowed his eyes - she'd never had a knock on the door, not since he'd been here.

"What the..." she muttered, putting her coffee down and standing up.

Then there was another loud banging, and a deep male voice identifying the visitors. "FBI."

He jumped up from the couch, and Summer stopped in her tracks. He disappeared from her sight, like a ghost.

* * *

Her gun was on her person, and this was the first thing she double checked when she heard the word "FBI". A million different scenarios raced through her head, all ending worse than the one before, and the last thing she did before going to the door was to tell the newly reappeared David to go to his room and not come back out until she said he could. She also told him to take off the aluminum foil arm.

James had vanished into thin air.

Halfway through the third banging on the door, she opened it. Two agents stood on the other side, one man and one woman, wearing the typical "men in black" suits one would expect from the FBI.

"Good evening, ma'am," the man nodded and smiled. He looked to be in his 30's and seemed non-threatening at first glance. "Sorry to bother you, but we've had a report of a fugitive sighting in this area and we have to follow up."

"Oh... well, I haven't seen anyone," she shrugged. "It's pretty quiet around here."

The woman, tall and blonde and decidedly more severe looking than the man, smiled. "We're going to need to search your home, ma'am. Please step aside."

Panic tickled quietly at her spine. "Do you have a warrant?"

The woman merely chuckled. "Step aside."

The two agents then shoved their way inside, and the tickle of panic exploded into the full-blown kind, and instantly she knew that something bad was going to happen. There was no possible way that this would end in peace, and every instinct she had told her that the agents were not from the FBI. They hadn't even shown I.D. or given names. It was as if they didn't even care to lie convincingly.

"How many heat signatures did you pick up?" the woman asked the man as they began to search the house with their guns out. Summer's heart began thudding painfully.

"Three," the man answered.

"He's in here somewhere."

She waited until they had spread out, one in the living room and one down the hall, and she ran into David's room. She'd just grabbed him and was about to make him hide in his closet when that cold female voice sounded right behind her. "Don't think so. Out to the kitchen, both of you."

She closed her eyes and tried to swallow down the fear, but the sinking, paralyzing feeling within was getting worse with each passing moment. She had no choice but to comply with the woman's orders.

At gunpoint, the female agent marched mother and son out to the kitchen, then made them both get on their knees on the floor. David was starting to make a low-pitched whining noise, and all Summer could do was hold him close and tell him that everything was going to be fine. She also told him to keep his eyes closed.

The woman kept her gun on them while the man searched the house from top to bottom. Summer waited, ever mindful of the gun the agents hadn't thought to check her for - how typical, but she was thankful - and when the man came back, the words out of his mouth didn't surprise her.

"No sign of him."

The woman sighed. "Grab the boy."

That was a moment Summer would never forget - the moment that she learned what fear truly was.

Her hand shot to her gun in a flash. She jumped up, holding David close with her left arm and pulling the trigger with her right hand. She aimed for the woman first, and when a bullet hit her right shoulder, she fell with a loud cry of pain. She fired again, and the bullet missed and ricocheted into a nearby vase, which shattered and showered the floor in broken glass. Summer aimed for the man next, but he was quick; he knocked the gun from her grip, which wasn't as good as it would have been had it been two-handed, and then he thrust a long stick into her neck. Electric shock coursed through her body, and as she convulsed, she lost her grip on her son.

She hit the glass-covered floor with a great thud. The shock hadn't been powerful enough to knock her out, but it left her paralyzed and shaking violently. Her eyes were wide open, and David's screams pierced her ears as she laid there on her side, disarmed and all but defenseless, watching as the male agent took her only son and put a gun to his head.

The female agent had recovered and was standing over her. "Where is he? Where is the Winter Soldier? Tell us or the boy dies."

It suddenly occurred to her that she couldn't give them that answer even if she'd wanted to. She had not seen where he'd gone to, and thus had no idea where he was. Maybe he was halfway through the forest by now.

The woman grabbed her by her hair and wrenched her up into her knees, thrusting her forward to face David more directly. "Tell us or he dies!"

David was screaming more loudly and more desperately than she had ever heard before. His terror was written plainly on his small, innocent face, and he was trying to fight the man's hold on him.

She was crying, but she was completely unaware of it. The only thing she could see or hear was David, and her complete inability to save him from the monsters threatening him.

"I don't know where he is," she answered honestly.

Then the woman nodded to the man. Summer never found out what that nod meant, because a knife flew through the air, spinning and turning and aimed absolutely perfectly at its target, which was between the male agent's eyes.

The blade buried itself to the handle, right on target, and the man's grips on the gun and on David instantly slackened. The gun hit the floor and David ran to Summer. As the male agent hit the floor, the woman swiveled around to face the object of her hunt, only to get backhanded by a metal hand. Her gun fired and missed; he grabbed her arm with his right hand and used his left to crack in in half. The gun fell to the floor as she let out an anguished cry, and a metal hand wrapped around her throat and lifted her up effortlessly into the air.

Summer watched, holding David close and covering his eyes and ears as they huddled in a corner of the kitchen. Somewhere through her shock of what she'd just experienced and was still experiencing, she was still somewhat able to comprehend who she had to thank for her son escaping death, and how utterly deadly and vicious that same man looked right then. Everything she had read about him was suddenly proven true and yet proven wrong at the same time, because the assassin she'd read about never would have bothered to save a child. He never would have saved anyone.

"Go ahead," the woman sputtered, "kill me. There'll always be more of us."

"Why do you want me dead?" he growled, tightening his grip on her throat.

"HYDRA has no loose ends," she replied, turning purple. "You should know. Tying up the loose ends was always something you did beautifully."

With another growl, he dropped the woman to her feet and then snapped her neck with an almost lazy jerk of his hands. The crack reverberated against Summer's eardrums, and after the body hit the floor, there was nothing but silence.

He stared at the bodies for several long moments, anger and hatred clear on his face. Summer tried to focus on breathing, on keeping her head together and not completely falling apart, but she knew she was fighting a losing battle.

James looked her way, and their eyes met, but he didn't say a word, and she was not physically able to speak.

He dragged the bodies outside, then closed the door behind him. He'd left her gun by her side before leaving, but he gave no explanation as to where he was going. He didn't need to. She knew he was going to go dispose of the bodies, and she didn't want to know where or how he was going to do that.

She stared at the considerable amount of blood smeared on her kitchen floor. She didn't blink or move her gaze from it until she let go and let herself fall apart, clutching her little boy with every ounce of strength she had, and letting all of the terror, fear, and relief release and flow away through tears that rained down heavily from her eyes.

**A/N: sooo some action! The next chapter is arguably my favorite one of this story, and I consider this one here the point where things start getting "interesting" lol, so stick with me! :) Thank you to everyone who is reading, following, and/or reviewing this story, I love you all bunches! See you in a few days, as usual :D **


	8. Chapter 8

He returned later that night to find Summer's kitchen floor spotless, scrubbed clean of the blood he'd spilled on it a few hours earlier. The house was quiet, too quiet, and if her truck hadn't been parked outside, he would have thought she'd taken her son and fled.

Nobody could blame her if she had. After all, he was the reason that her life and her son's life had been put in danger. She would be wise to either put him out or get out herself.

He moved past the almost too-clean floor and stepped into the hallway, mentally reaffirming the decision he'd made about an hour before. He'd leave in the morning. After all, he could accomplish nothing here, and he had enough guilt weighing on his mind without adding to the body count. The last thing he wanted was for the one person who had showed him kindness to pay the price for it as she almost had that night.

As he walked, a few strips of discarded foil crunched under his feet. His ever-present frown deepened, and he tried to put aside thoughts of the boy's little copycat arm and the way he'd screamed when there was a gun to his head.

He walked into the bathroom, flipped the light on, and then came to a standstill at the sight awaiting him. Summer was curled up against the bathtub, knees to her chest, trembling slightly, and staring in front of her with no indication that she'd seen him walk in.

It was no surprise that she'd be in shock. He wasn't fully sure where he'd learned the signs from, or how he knew to go and fix her a drink, but the instinct came from somewhere, and a few minutes later, he was knelt in front of her and making her take a drink the first thing he'd found, which was a juice box.

He had to hold the thing for her, but she drained it in under a minute. She started blinking mildly rapidly, and he tossed the empty box before peering at her and muttering, "Summer?"

Her eyes held a better clarity, and she finally seemed to notice his presence once he said her name. Her gaze fell on his, and he was about to say something else when her already-red eyes welled up with fresh tears.

This was where he lost any sense of what he was supposed to do.

Helpless and instantly full of discomfort at the sight of a woman crying, he shifted back and put more distance between them, looking away while the tears fell. First he contemplated simply exiting the room and leaving her to cry, because that seemed like the easiest thing to do. Then he thought of how she had helped him all this time with absolutely no incentive, no real reason, beyond what he ever would have asked or expected.

Some voice in his head, not vicious or poisonous like the others, whispered quietly from a deep, dark, barely perceptible corner of his mind. Whatever it was, whatever it came from, it led him to what he did next.

Instead of leaving her, he reached forward with both arms and then effortlessly scooped her up into them. She felt stiff and limp at the same time, somehow, and she made no move to hold on to him or do anything other than cry more. As he got to his feet and took them out of the room, one of her arms shifted and he noticed blood stains on her white tank top, around the left side of her ribcage. He couldn't remember her being injured.

He took her to her bedroom, and after carefully setting her down on the side of her bed, he left to go rummaging around for supplies in her bathroom. When he came back with a first aid kit that looked nearly two decades old, he found her exactly as he'd left her, but she was sniffing and trying to stifle the tears now.

Setting the kit down on the floor, he knelt down in front of her again, glancing up at her cautiously. She stared back at him, no longer vacant but still utterly distraught, and he glanced down at her midsection and suddenly felt uneasy.

Feeling like the words were rocks in his mouth, he forced out the start of a question. "Can I -"

She nodded quickly before he could finish. Not knowing that he was holding his breath, he carefully reached for the hem of her shirt and pulled it up, revealing smooth, moderately tan skin marred by a few small shards of glass sticking out from three places on her ribcage.

Still holding his breath, he looked up at her eyes again, finding them back to being slightly glassy. When he let go of her top to reach for the kit, it fell, and when that happened several more times, he looked at her again and said, "You need to take that off."

She simply stared forward, blinking only occasionally, and he almost gave up at that point. Her silence was frustrating, and he barely knew what he was doing anyway, and his lack of patience could not be overstated. But, the same little voice that had nagged him to bring her here to begin with urged him to stay the course.

"Summer," he said slowly, looking her directly in the eye, "You need to take this off."

Still nothing. With irritation, he then solved the problem in a way that didn't seem at all drastic or ill-advised until he'd already done it, taking her shirt by the bottom and simply ripping it open. The fact that he ripped it all the way apart was an accident that even surprised himself.

Her gasp startled him enough to break him from his half-second long daze and make him realize that he'd been staring at neither her face nor her wound, and he looked up quickly to find her completely lucid and suddenly breathing rapidly, as if she'd been asleep and just woke up a bucket of cold water on her face.

The rapid breathing made her chest rise and fall heavily, and he looked down at it before he could stop himself.

Somewhere in his head, that nagging little voice was laughing at him.

* * *

Suddenly, she was in a whole other kind of shock.

Prior to the moment she'd heard and felt her top rip, she'd been more like a bystander to her own peril, seemingly watching him find her huddled on her bathroom floor and carry her to her room rather than actually participating in the events. After David had fallen asleep crying and she had scrubbed her bloody floor, she had retreated to the bathroom to clean up but had ended up collapsing into a puddle of pathetic tears. Situations like the one she'd endured that night, she discovered, were never done justice in the movies. Nothing could accurately portray the level of sheer horror and devastation that she'd felt watching her innocent son have a gun shoved at his temple.

So, eventually, she had shut down. That, she understood. She also understood why he'd come in and picked her up, though she found it extremely surprising.

But why on earth, in the name of all that was good in the world, had he torn her shirt?

Blinking back leftover moisture in her eyes and trying extremely hard to catch her breath, their eyes met, and she felt her heart start immediately pounding against her chest. Which was where he looked next, and all of her blood rushed to her face in a mad dash to display her embarrassment as effectively as a neon sign.

But then he caught himself, and he looked away quickly, almost looking ashamed. Then he started fumbling with her first aid kit, which she noticed for the first time. She glanced down at her exposed torso, now bare but for a now-trash tank and white bra, and suddenly it all made sense. She'd had glass sticking out of her all this time and hadn't even noticed, but he had.

She would have breathed a sigh of relief, but it was only the start of her ordeal.

Her hands held on tightly to the bed beneath her as she watched him grab a few items from her kit, and he didn't dare raise his eyes an inch above her wounds when he began plucking the shards out. It stung, but leftover adrenaline left the wounds mostly numb and also kept her pulse racing. At least, she preferred to think that it was the adrenaline.

He was slow and methodical about the work. She focused on breathing and trying to clear her head, but the combination of worn off shock and adrenaline and coming to the way that she had left her feeling mildly drunk and extremely jittery. And calming down was not an option when he was as close as he was and also touching her.

The air felt suffocatingly hot, and his pointed refusal to let his eyes wander again wasn't helping. She could look at nothing but him. The completely serious, sober look on his face, the slight furrow of his brow, and careful movements of his fingers were making her dizzy.

Then metal fingers brushed against her stomach, surely on accident, and she jumped a little at the coldness of it. That hand jerked away instantly, and he blinked several times, but he still wouldn't look up.

She tried to think of something to say to lighten the atmosphere, make it slightly less overwhelming, but she could only draw blanks. What was there to say? Ask what he'd done with the dead agents' bodies? Find out if this was the first time he was looking at a semi-exposed female body since World War II?

She did need to thank him for saving her son's life, though. But she thought that might be better suited to a moment where he wasn't digging into her skin with tweezers.

She wound up fixating on a focal point, which was a particular lock of his dark hair that seemed to be determined to block some of his vision. He acted like he didn't notice it, but it was right in front of his left eye, and when he blinked, the lock fluttered, and she knew it had to be on his nerves.

That same piece of hair, when he leaned forward slightly to get a better look at the very last shard, tickled against her stomach, and it took every ounce of willpower to not giggle or jump or otherwise act like a moron. Then he pulled back and kept working, and the hair remained firmly in front of his eye.

Later on, she'd blame what she did next on that vaguely drunken feeling she had, or on the general trauma of the day, because never in a million years would she otherwise have reached forward, taken the lock between her thumb and forefinger, and moved it behind his ear for him.

He immediately froze and became as still as a statue. Her hand hung awkwardly suspended between them, and her eyes widened when she realized that she'd actually done that and not just imagined it.

Finally, he looked upwards towards her face, and when their eyes met, she was sure that her pounding heart simply stopped beating entirely.

* * *

He didn't know what he was seeing in her eyes. Shock at herself was the only discernible thing he could see, but that wasn't an explanation of the touch that had left his skin tingling.

Faced with this, he reverted back to what he did best. He stared at her and analyzed what he saw in order to form an acceptably explanatory answer.

Her breathing was still heavy, her cheeks were flushed like she'd been running, her pupils were dilated, and for once, she wasn't squirming away from his gaze. There had been a time where he would have known what all of this meant and it wouldn't have required the slightest amount of investigating to do so, but that time was of no help to him now.

"S... sorry," she eventually half-whispered. Only when he continued to stare at her did she finally look away, towards nothing.

He went back to his work, the next step of which was cleaning the cuts, but he couldn't shake the feeling of... something. He was missing something. And he didn't like missing things.

She didn't hiss or groan in pain when the alcohol hit the cuts, but he felt her tense slightly under the small pad he used to wipe them. That one small unexpected touch of hers to his hair had broken his resolve of looking nowhere besides the points of injury, and now he was trying so hard to fight the urge that it almost hurt.

On the last step of patching her up, he took a couple of bandages from the kit and opened them, glancing up at her eyes as he did. She wasn't looking away anymore, and the way that she so uncharacteristically looked straight at him was intriguing. He looked away to apply the bandages, pressing them down gently on the places that needed them. Her hand's grip on the bed tightening as he did this drew his attention. He didn't think it was a response to pain.

With the last bandage, he let the fingers of his right hand linger after he pressed it down. Her skin was so soft that it was bewildering. Softness and warmth was unfamiliar, but what he did know of it, he knew from his weeks of living with her. In fact, anything pleasant that he knew from the only memories he had that weren't blurry or porous, was all thanks to her.

Touching her was no different. Watching his own fingertips slide just barely from the bandage to the perfect skin beneath, over her ribs, was... nice. Pleasant, like those brief moments he'd sometimes see in his dreams before the screaming would start again.

His eyes led themselves, free of any better judgment, to run down over her flat, exposed stomach, taking their time before moving back up and over curves that made his hands twitch with ghosts of instincts that were buried, but still existent, somewhere.

By the time he looked upon her face again, she was breathing through parted lips and noticeably trembling. He straightened from the position that he'd been tending to her in, taking his hand off of her at last, and that brought them to the same eye level. He caught sight of the yellowing bruise on her left shoulder, the one that he'd accidentally given to her days ago, and he wondered how many more injuries she'd suffer because of his presence if he stayed.

"James," she said quietly, unexpectedly, bringing his gaze back to hers as soon as the name left her mouth. "I..." She licked her lips as she searched for words, and he watched the motion intently, on the verge of feeling overwhelmed by the unfamiliar things she was making him feel. "Thank you for what you did today. Thank you for saving my baby."

And that, above all else, took the cake when it came to unfamiliarity. Gratitude, over something good - actually, genuinely, good - that he had done.

Then her hand was on his cheek, and he stared at her with slightly widened eyes that looked more innocent than he would have ever believed he was capable of.

* * *

She'd lost her already tenuous ability to think rationally when she had realized that he was letting his fingers trail over her skin on purpose, after she was fully patched up and his only excuse to touch her was gone. The blatant checking-out and eye contact that came after only served to chip away at what was left of her self control.

And the way that he looked at her after she had thanked him, after she had gained the courage to touch him again... _that_ was her ultimate undoing.

Circumstance gave her the perfect excuse for what she was about to do if it turned out to be a horrible idea. It also left her not caring in the slightest if it was.

When he didn't turn away from her touch, he instead looked - not stared - at her with what could only be real vulnerability and humanity in his so-often unnerving blue eyes. It made her chest ache to see it.

Heart racing and stomach fluttering, she crossed the point of no return and leaned forward, watching his eyes fall to her lips as she did. Afraid of him running away, she didn't let the moment linger. She slid the hand on his cheek into his hair and then pressed her lips to his.

Though she felt like a firecracker had exploded in her chest at the first touch of his lips, she kept it simple, light, and easy, for his sake. The last thing she wanted to do was scare him away. He was still against her, but not as frozen as he could have been. He didn't kiss back, but his lips were soft and not unwelcoming. She focused on why she was kissing him, all of the reasons and little feelings that had been growing under her nose while she had been oblivious to herself all this time, and she just hoped that she was giving him one pleasant memory that would stand out amid a myriad of horrible ones.

When it was over and she drew away, reluctantly letting her hand leave his hair and feeling instantly colder for it, she was almost afraid to meet his gaze, but she did. He was staring at her a bit wide-eyed, in slight shock and maybe a little bit of confusion too, and something else she couldn't define. Something like warmth. Whatever it was, she had taken the risk and no disaster had resulted. Her only problem was the heat now slithering through her veins with no outlet.

Suddenly realizing her still very ripped top, she looked down and then pulled the two halves together with one hand to cover herself before gingerly easing up from the bed to her feet. Her knees weren't the most stable and her legs felt like jelly - probably for several reasons - but she made herself walk towards the door. In the morning, she could freak out about the way she'd chosen to end this very terrible, horrific day.

But she wasn't halfway through the room before a warm hand suddenly grasped her wrist from behind and spun her around before she could so much as yelp in surprise. She found herself looking up into stormy, chilling blue eyes, only a short breath away from him, and the sheer determination in his gaze was enough to make her lose her ability to breathe.

* * *

Staring down at her shocked, waiting face, he watched her gasp a little bit when his left arm slid behind her and pulled her close.

Her kiss had awakened memories not made of pictures or scenes, but rather those of the physical sort that had laid dormant for ages. Those things that he didn't have permission to feel or even remember, things that made him a human being and not a machine, all sparked to new, albeit fragile life by one touch from a woman who couldn't have known the significance of what she was doing.

How could he let her walk away?

With his right hand, he cautiously risked touching her face, on her cheek as she had done with him only moments ago, and she didn't recoil or turn away.

He couldn't wait another moment. He kissed her with all the force that she hadn't used on him, and he let his mind go deliciously blank in favor of allowing himself to do what they'd never let him do, which was to simply feel.

He felt her hands, soft and deceptively strong, slowly rise to clutch the fabric of the t-shirt covering his shoulders. He felt her body, warm and pliant as the touch of his lips made her press herself even closer than his left arm demanded of her. He felt her hair under his flesh fingertips, soft as the flowers it always smelled like, tangling around his fingers like it had done so a hundred times before. He felt her lips, eager against his own and teaching him how to do this, how to remember with skin and not with the brain, and how to make the pain stop long enough to feel good again - if only for a time.

She had been cautious with him when she had first kissed him, gentle even, but he treated her in accordance with what he knew her to be - hardy and not the least bit frail, despite the state she was in that particular night. Something came to life from within that drove him to kiss her as desperately as he did, to hold her a little too tightly to keep her from disappearing like everything else always did, and every move he made only made her respond with more desperation of her own.

The first time he felt her tongue brush his own, an uncontrollable groan had escaped his throat, and he had to break away for a moment to breathe. He kept his eyes shut tight, both of them breathing hard, and he buried his nose in her hair, just behind her ear. He inhaled deeply, committing everything about the scent to memory, letting it wash over him like the comforting thing that it was. Then there was her lips, tempting and sweet, on his neck while her hand held his hair back, and there was no hiding the shudder that raced through his body.

He didn't move, letting her kiss a line up to his ear, reveling in the little sparks each touch created, until she turned him back towards her and drew him into a longer, deeper kiss than the last.

His time of needing to follow her lead was fleeting. His brain may have been useless a majority of the time when it came to many things, but his body knew how to do this, despite all that had been done to it over the years, and he never could have guessed how powerful it would be to reclaim that part of himself.

Summer's lips were swollen when she drew away slightly, panting and trying to speak as he continued his assault between her gasps. "I - James, I -"

"Bucky." The name flew out of his mouth without his consent, without explanation, leaving him to suddenly still and furrow his brows as he stared at the woman he'd spoken it to.

"You want me to call you that instead?" she asked gently, the corners of her mouth suggesting that she was hiding a smile.

"I don't know... why I said that," he admitted.

"You said it because it's your name," she shrugged, smiling before kissing him again, then saying the name against his lips.

He still wasn't sure if the name really felt right. But, maybe no name could possibly feel right after so many years of not having one at all, and maybe the name flying out of his mouth unexpectedly was a sign, however tenuous, of a part of the man he'd once been still existing somewhere inside.

And if nothing else, he liked the way the name sounded on Summer's lips.

She kissed him again, and once more, one kiss became many. It was addicting, and feeling the sensations and shivers that it caused was completely intoxicating.

So when a muffled sound from the room next door reached both pairs of ears, Bucky was at first quite ready to refuse to let her go. But, the sound was her son crying in his sleep, and as soon as Summer realized what it was, she extracted herself from his arms quickly and faltered for a moment before rushing to her closet to grab a new shirt.

He watched in a daze, but it was all right for once, because the daze was decidedly pleasant. Summer threw on the first shirt she found and then raced towards the door, stopping only when she grabbed the doorknob to turn and look at him and fumble for words. "Um... uh..."

"Go," he nodded. She smiled appreciatively and left, and when she closed the door, he stared at it for some time after.

He suddenly had a lot to sit down and think about.

* * *

Summer laid in bed, David back to sleep and snuggled securely to her side, leaving her to stare at the ceiling with wide eyes.

It was all too much for one day. Way too much. She knew this because, after trying to process it, she had almost lost it all over again. So, she decided, she was not going to try to process anything tonight. She was going to lay there and go to sleep, because she'd been through hell that day, and she needed to sleep tonight if she was going to satisfactorily freak out the next morning.

If not for the swollen state of her lips and the tangled mess of her hair, she would have assumed that she'd hallucinated everything that had happened after James - or as she was going to have to get used to saying, Bucky - came back to the house. But she most certainly had not.

She grabbed the pillow out from under her head and threw it on top of her face, suppressing the urge to scream. Then she opened her eyes and quickly put the pillow back after seeing Captain America's patriotic face on the pillowcase. She'd had enough of super soldiers for one night.

Sort of. She was also actively making herself not run back into her room and pick up where they'd left off.

But, just when she thought that she would never get to sleep that night, exhaustion suddenly overtook her as unexpectedly as all of the rest of day's events had, and she was out.

Meanwhile, next door, Bucky laid awake in her bed, mind racing with the night's events and his attempts to make sense of them. He eventually drifted off to sleep as well, and it helped that for once, he had one thing that was genuinely pleasant to think about when he closed his eyes. And that alone made it all completely worth it, regardless of whatever happened next.

**A/N: Sooooo I'm impatient and you guys all had a great response to the last chapter, so I figured I'd post this a little early :D hope you guys liked it, do let me know what you think :D see you all in a few days! Thanks so much for reading and the lovely reviews! :)))**


	9. Chapter 9

For the first time since his arrival some weeks ago, Bucky didn't wake up screaming. However, Summer did.

She awoke sweating and hoarse, sitting up with a gasp and finding David at her side, staring at her with worry and fear on his face. As the haunting images from her nightmare faded slowly with consciousness, she closed her eyes and took a deep breath, pushing her hair back and muttering, "I'm okay, sweetie, I'm okay... just a bad dream."

David didn't look convinced, and after another moment of staring at her with concern, he threw his arms around her in a tight hug. She wrapped her arms around him in turn, still trying to will herself to calm down after having dreamed of the prior night's events turning out very differently than they had.

She knew that this was only the beginning, and night would be her enemy for the foreseeable future. Coming so close to losing her son was not something she could shake off and not see every time she closed her eyes.

"Everything's okay," she said softly, though she wasn't sure if she was telling David or herself. "We're okay, we're safe." But it may be some time until she felt even remotely safe again.

Eventually, she dragged herself and David up and out of bed, and as they made their way out of the room, she absently ran her hand through her hair and met a particularly tangled knot. That made her stop in her tracks and remember the other shocking event from the night before.

She closed her eyes and started cursing mentally. _That_ had really happened. And now she had to go and face him and try not to act like a complete idiot in the process.

But, when she stepped out into the hall, she heard what sounded like her front door closing quietly. She frowned and peered down the hallway towards the door, then glanced at her bedroom door, which was open. A quick glance inside found it empty, and an uneasy feeling spread through her gut as she hurried to the front door.

She threw the door open and then squinted her eyes to adjust to the bright sun directly overhead, but the dark figure strolling towards the trees with a backpack slung over his shoulder - one that she owned - was unmistakable.

"J-" she faltered, remembering how he'd told her call him something else and trying not to blush at the memory. "Bucky! What are you doing?"

To her ire, he acted as if he hadn't heard her and kept walking. She narrowed her eyes and checked that David was right behind her before marching right out the door, barefoot and with hair like a rat's nest, not caring a bit. "Bucky!"

"Go back inside," she eventually heard him mutter while she winced at the sharp sticks crunching under her feet.

Already sick of staring at his back, she shot back, "Sorry, but after everything I've gone through since you showed up here, I'm a little offended that you're trying to just disappear out the door without any explanation or even a goodbye."

Finally, he stopped walking and turned around, and their eyes met for the first time since... well, since what she was currently labeling "the incident" in her head. She forced herself to not look away or fidget, reminding herself that she was an adult, a mother, and quite mature enough to not internally freak out.

Or something like that.

"I can't stay here," he said quietly.

"... My cooking that bad?" she said, attempting humor badly. When he only blinked in response, she sighed. "Do you even know where you're going?"

"Doesn't mater," he shrugged. "I'll figure it out."

"Or they'll find you and kill you," she replied.

"They won't." He seemed extremely sure of this.

"But..." she struggled for words, trying to make sense of all the reasons why she was so aghast at the thought of him leaving. She knew he had to go eventually, but the timing wasn't right yet. She just knew that it wasn't.

"It's better for you both if I go," he said. "HYDRA never would have come here if not for me."

"But... everything I've done to help you, and all of this, will be for nothing if you run off and they catch you."

Annoyance flickered across his face. "They won't."

"You have nowhere to go," she argued. "Not that I'm much of an expert with this crap, but if you just keep running and running, won't they eventually catch up? And you need help, Bucky. You're doing better, but eventfully you're gonna need real help."

That brought a deep frown to his face. Hoping that she was getting somewhere, and briefly glancing behind her to find David lurking behind her legs, she spoke again. "Look, just... come back inside. Stay a few more days, and I'll help you figure out where to go. There's still a lot of their files floating around on the Internet. Maybe you could start looking through those and try to come up with a plan, if revenge is really what you want."

He seemed to be considering her idea. After a moment, she cracked a smile and added, "Besides, you can't leave without your usual three cups of coffee to start the day."

If he had been one to smile, she suspected, he would have in that moment. But, as it was, he was not, and a barely-there flash of amusement that vanished immediately after appearing in his eye was as close as she was going to get.

Looking almost burdened by it all, Bucky let the backpack slip from his shoulder to his left hand, and he walked past her with his head down slightly as he made his way back to her front door. Her stomach fluttered when his arm almost brushed hers in the process, and she was torn between enjoying the feeling and berating herself.

But anything was better than replaying the violence and trauma of the day before, so she gave herself a break and followed him into the house, refusing to feel guilty if she admired the broadness of his shoulders along the way.

* * *

His plans thwarted by the begrudgingly accurate assessment that Summer had provided, Bucky found himself sitting at her kitchen table, watching her make coffee as he had many times before. This time was different, however, as her movements were clumsy and everything about her spoke of someone deeply on edge.

At one point, she dropped a mug and it shattered on the floor. It made David jump and yelp from his place at the table, and though Summer was quick to ease her son's startle, he could see her hands shaking as she stared down at the mess.

Before, he would have just watched her clean it up with mild interest. But after all that had transpired, and after the peculiar events of the night prior, it seemed natural to get up and do it for her, especially since the broken ceramic was littering the same place on the floor that had been covered in blood last night. The longer she stared at it, the more far-away her eyes became.

As soon as he reached down with his left hand to pick up the largest chunk, Summer seemed to snap out of it and immediately began protesting. "Oh, no, you don't have to do that - really, please don't -"

He straightened and looked at her in a way that immediately silenced her. Then he picked up the rest of the pieces and tossed them into the trash before looking her over. She looked almost ashamed, definitely embarrassed. Then she shook her head and turned around, escaping his gaze and getting another cup from a cabinet.

This was why he had decided to go through with his original idea and leave. There was nothing that he could do to really repay this woman for her help, besides continue to put her life in danger by continuing to take advantage of her kindness. If HYDRA had tracked him there once, they'd do it again, regardless of how he'd tried to throw them off the trail when he'd dumped the bodies. And he didn't like waking up to the sound of her screaming, and he was even less fond of being the ultimate cause of it.

A part of him wanted to leave, to move on and do something that would feel more productive to his goals than sitting in a house and leeching off of her. It had felt all too natural to kill those agents the night before, and there was no denying the bloodshed he craved. It was all he knew, what he was programmed for, and now that he had turned against his former masters, it was the next natural course of action.

Except, there was a different part of him, a growing one, that had a reason for also wanting to stay.

As she poured the coffee into two intact cups, he stared at the back of her head and trailed his eyes over the hair that he really spent far too much time thinking about. He could tell that she hadn't brushed it since the night before, because it was mussed and visibly knotted in the same places where his hand had been.

He reached out and touched it before he could think about it first. She stiffened instantly, and he panicked slightly, dropping his hand.

Then she turned and handed him his cup, avoiding eye contact. He took it with his right hand, and watched her squirm just slightly when his fingers brushed hers.

Walking away, back to the table, he drank half the contents in one gulp, taking her awkwardness as confirmation that she fully regretted kissing him.

* * *

Summer knew that it was going to be a tough day, but she hadn't anticipated acting as strangely as she had.

David was at his clingiest that day, stuck to her side like glue, and she completely understood why. He jumped at every little sound and cried one time when she left to use the bathroom. She realized that he probably needed extra therapy to process what had happened, and yet she couldn't tell his doctor the honest truth, or any version of it for that matter. She could lie and say there had been a break in, concoct a cover story but there would be no police report to refer to and no evidence, setting up a very undesirable possibility of getting caught lying and being investigated.

Then there was the events themselves to consider. HYDRA agents had been in her house, and she was fairly sure that others would eventually find Bucky there too. Everything he had said when he'd tried to leave had been true. She should have let him go.

Instead, she gave him a crash course in how to use her computer after acting immensely stupid following the hair-touching incident. She'd be kicking herself over that one for awhile, but she'd panicked. How could she not when she knew he would be leaving, certainly for good, very soon?

And so, she fidgeted and sat nervously all morning while Bucky adapted surprisingly well to technology. She tried not to think about his lips or the color of his eyes or the fact that her first kiss in an embarrassingly long time had been the undisputed best of her life.

The problem was, when she wasn't thinking about those things, she was thinking about tasers on her neck and dead bodies and David screaming. There wasn't a whole lot of in between quite yet.

By the afternoon, she had to do something with her hands or else she was going to lose it. So she randomly decided that it was a great time to make a three-tier chocolate cake, letting David help to give him something to do as well, while sneaking glances at Bucky every few minutes and hoping he didn't notice. He didn't seem to, being knee-deep in an online HYDRA investigation.

But, nothing she did to pass the time could occupy her mind. Everywhere she looked in the house, she saw a piece of the night before that set her further on edge. David was having the same problem too, she could tell.

So, to escape the oppressive air and encroaching memories now associated with a house she'd loved since childhood, she got hers and David's shoes on and walked up to her guest and interrupted his charmingly two-fingered typing to ask, "Want to go on a walk?"

* * *

There was a trail that led through the woods, along a creek that emptied out into a picturesque river about a twenty minute walk away. He'd been reluctant to come at first, but she had persuaded him through the promise of sunlight and fresh air. Until that moment, he had yet to realize how many of his memories involved enclosed, dark rooms. Sunlight and being outside was a human thing. Maybe it would be as nice as she claimed it would.

He kept his hood up as they walked, answering her randomly asked questions with one word answers. Reading through a number of leaked files had left him in a poor mood, as he had not learned much from them and there was far too much information around for one person to go through. It was frustrating, and he wasn't sure the files would ever get him anywhere.

But, he had to admit once they reached the river, being outside and in the warmth of the sun was nice. David had a stick in his hand and went about tossing rocks into various points of the water when Summer sat down on a bank, motioning for him to do the same.

The blue, clear water and the smell of the freshwater almost jogged a memory. He felt it at the periphery, but it never quite made it through. But, for whatever reason, the water made him think of Steve Rogers. That made his frown deepen a little bit, because most of his memories about the man were stuck in limbo as well.

"I used to come here all the time with my Grandma," Summer said, looking out into the water. "She taught me how to fish here. I've tried to teach David but he doesn't have the patience for it yet."

He kept his eyes on the water, not wanting to look at her. He was tired of seeing her obvious discomfort when he did.

"I've lived here since I was six," she went on. "I've always loved the land and the area, and the house. But I hate my kitchen right now."

From the corner of his eye, he saw her turn slightly towards him and look at him as she spoke again, this time more quietly. "Look, I'm not stupid. I know how I'm acting and how it must look. But it's not what you think."

That got his attention. He finally looked at her, and found her gaze to be slightly guilty before she averted it to David, who was walking along the river's edge close by.

"I'm just... trying to process everything, and I'm not doing a very good job of it. And David was watching when you touched my hair, and I just... kind of panicked. I know you're not going to be around much longer. I'll probably never see you again once you're gone."

"You regret it," he surmised.

"No," she said quickly, shaking her head. "Not at all. I knew that's what I made you think. I'm sorry."

His brow furrowed slightly. If she didn't regret it, then why was she acting the way that she was? Had he always been this clueless?

Then he felt the hood on his head fall, and he looked up to see her pull her hand back and smile. "The whole point of being in the sun is to feel it on your face. It's the best part."

He looked from her to the sky, squinting slightly at the brightness of the sun as it shone through tall green tree tops. It hurt his eyes, but not as much as the blinding fluorescent ones he sometimes saw in his dreams, the ones that shined mercilessly into his eyes as a machine destroyed his mind. The sun was warm instead of cold and lifeless. The warmth made him think of the woman sitting beside him, who exuded warmth even in her name.

When he turned back to her, she was giving him the same small smile, and he was falling into his habit of studying her when her son suddenly stood directly in front of him, blocking the sunlight entirely.

He looked up to find the boy smiling at him, holding out a medium-sized rock in his outstretched hand. Bucky took it with his right hand, and then David shook his head and pointed to his metal one. Then he pointed at the water and moved to the side.

Bucky dropped the rock into his left hand and looked at it for a moment, turning it over once or twice before looking up at the water. With barely an ounce of effort, he threw the rock, and it skidded along the surface of the water briefly before plunging into the depths with a greater splash than David had ever seen from a rock so small.

The boy stood there with his mouth ajar for a moment before rushing to pick up several more rocks and deposit them I to Bucky's hand. He glanced at Summer and found her grinning at him. "He's gonna make you do that for at least an hour now."

She wasn't kidding.

* * *

Summer was sad to retreat indoors when night began to fall. She didn't want to go back to feeling as stifled and haunted as she had earlier in the day, but on the bright side, at least she'd cleared things up with Bucky. She hoped.

Back home, Bucky went back to operating her computer, slowly and with a frown that wouldn't budge, so Summer busied herself with whatever she could that didn't involve being in her kitchen. She ended up cuddled with the still-super clingy David on her couch, watching a movie, at least until a dull thudding sound from the kitchen made them both jump.

She sat up straight and peered to where Bucky was sitting at the table, still behind her computer. He didn't look up from it but muttered an apology - apparently he had felt the need to punch her table. Shockingly, the thing wasn't shattered to pieces. She calmed down and checked the time; it would be David's bedtime soon.

She got up and wandered into the kitchen to get a drink, then glanced at her cake sitting on the counter that only had one piece missing from it. Letting David help her decorate it meant there was about five different kinds of candy stuck to the frosting, and every shade of sprinkles imaginable. It looked ridiculous, but it made her smile. She grabbed a plate from an overhead cabinet and cut a piece on to it, then headed towards the table.

"Hey," she said, sitting down to Bucky's left and putting the plate down near him. "Thought you might want to take a break and eat something."

Looking from the computer to the offered plate, he scrutinized the piece of cake and then looked at her like she was nuts. She rolled her eyes and started scraping off the candy with a fork. "It's good, trust me. It only looks like a unicorn puked on it."

He still looked unsure, and she thought it was odd - she'd been making him food every day for how long now, and he was suspicious of cake, of all things? Proactively, she speared a bite of the cake with the fork and held out her hand, intending for him to take the utensil from her, nodding towards it.

He looked at the fork, then at her, and then back at the fork before leaning forward and opening his mouth. She had a split second of realizing that he assumed that she meant to feed him before he took the bite, and she gulped down against her suddenly fluttering insides as he drew away, thoughtfully chewing, oblivious to how apparently easy it was to make her heart start pounding. At least, she was pretty sure that he was oblivious.

"It's good," he said after swallowing. She blinked and looked at the fork still in her hand, then shoved it on the plate and pushed it towards him.

"Good. There you go," she said, gesturing to the plate, giving him a smile and then shifting in her seat. He looked at her like she was weird again, and she changed the subject. "Finding anything useful?"

He frowned and shrugged. "I don't know."

"I read that some of the most damaging files got yanked by the CIA after they got leaked," she said. "But there's still a ton out there. Every day people are digging and finding more stuff." A few days before, she'd seen a headline exclaiming that Lee Harvey Oswald had been exonerated and JFK conspiracy theorists vindicated due to the real assassin being confirmed by HYDRA's files. She didn't read anything further, having a bad feeling that she was living with said real assassin and not needing to see it written in print to believe it.

He didn't say anything, instead glaring at the computer while she thought about voicing something she'd been thinking about for awhile. She decided to just come out with it. "Have you thought about maybe... getting Steve Rogers to help you out?"

He looked up at her sharply - not hostilely, just sharply. "Why?"

"Just because... well, I'm not really sure what happened between you and him, but you fought on the helicarriers, right?" He nodded. "So I can assume he knows who you are?" He didn't nod, but the look in his eyes told her the answer was yes. "Did he try to hurt you or help you?"

He winced slightly, and discernible guilt flickered across his face. "I almost killed him, but he said... something. I couldn't do it."

"You remembered him?"

He nodded.

"Well," she said quietly, "if he's anything like everyone says he is, he's probably looking for you. And he could probably help you remember a lot about who you were before. You grew up together. And it's kind of a miracle that he's still around today to help you out."

Bucky was silent for awhile, staring at the computer screen without seeing it. When he finally spoke, it was in a small voice. "I don't know how to face him."

She tried to think of a way to answer, but she knew she was a bit out of her depth with this one. She'd had her share of troubles and difficulties, maybe several shares, but she couldn't imagine being in Bucky's shoes. The fact that he was still standing at all was mind-blowing. "You just do. I can't tell you it'll be easy or make you feel better about it. It's just something that you'll have to do, sooner or later, if you want to keep getting better, I think."

When silence fell again, and she could see him retreating into his mind and losing himself in his own thoughts. With only a second or two of hesitation, she reached out a hand and gently touched the back of his right hand, the touch bringing him back to the present. After he looked down at her hand and then back up at her, she took a breath and said, "I'm not really sure how I'd try to get a hold of him. I can't call SHIELD, since it doesn't exist now, and it's not like his number's in the phone book. But if you want me to, I'll try to. I'll figure out a way."

He nodded, and she thought it best to leave it at that. She knew he had a lot to think about.

She walked back into the living room to find David asleep, curled up on the couch. She smiled at the sight for a moment before carefully picking up and taking him to his room.

After she stepped into the hallway, she glanced down the length of it and saw Bucky still sitting at the table, still deep in thought. Earlier, down at the river, he'd seemed lighter than he normally did. She noticed changes in his eyes and demeanor when he would interact with her or David, compared to how he looked during times like these, when he was alone with his thoughts. The dead, lifeless eyes she'd first met were slowly warming and coming to life, a little more every day, regardless of how small the increments. Though, of course, the night prior, it had been less of an increment and more of a giant leap.

She shivered, trying to push that particular thought away.

It wasn't particularly late; David had fallen asleep early due to his troubled sleep the night before. She walked back down the hall, trying to figure out what to do with the rest of the night, and then she remembered what she had been planning to do the day before, before HYDRA had come and racked up thousands of dollars worth of her future therapy sessions.

She walked up to the kitchen table, fully aware that this could be a bad idea - in a particular, not actually bad, sense - but she smiled and asked anyway, "Want to watch a movie?"

* * *

This time, when Bucky watched her sit down next to him on the couch, she didn't plaster herself against the opposite end and stutter. She sat down a more normal distance away from him, and though there was still a clear unease about her, she was more comfortable this time around. When she pointed a remote at the television and told him to keep his eyes on the screen, he dutifully obeyed. For awhile.

She had chosen the first Star Wars movie for them to watch, telling him that if he was going to watch his first movie since the '40s, it had to be that. In absolutely no position to argue, he just nodded and was amused by how satisfied with herself she seemed at getting him to watch a movie for the first time in decades.

He couldn't remember anything specific about watching movies in the past, though it seemed like a familiar enough concept that he was sure he'd watched some before. She named off a few titles and asked if they rang any bells, but he could only shrug. Most of those early years remained locked away, and he had to wonder if Summer was right, and if Steve really was the key to unlock it all.

But he did his best to clear his mind for once and actually watch the movie. To his own surprise, it managed to hold his interest, and he liked it enough to not get bored halfway through or fall asleep.

In fact, everything would have been fine if the woman next to him hadn't gotten sick of her hair tie jabbing into her head every time she leaned back against the cushions and taken her ponytail down.

He watched her as she finger-combed through a section of her hair before settling back against the couch, and then a few seconds later, she started talking. "Oh, that guy, he's important, he's a -"

She glanced at him and then fell instantly silent when she saw the way that he was looking at her. He watched faint color rise to her cheeks as she narrowed her eyes slightly and said, "Hey - are you not paying attention?"

"I was."

She opened her mouth, surely to chastise him to turn his full attention back to the movie, but his fingers reaching out to touch the ends of her hair stole her words right from her lips.

He hadn't forgotten her words from earlier, and they made perfect logical sense. They both knew he wouldn't be here for much longer. He also understood now why she had acted so strange earlier. But her boy was asleep now, and despite the reasons that remained as to why he shouldn't, he simply couldn't find the will to stop himself.

It was all he planned to do, to just feel the softness between his fingers and enjoy it for what it was.

"You seem to have a thing for my hair," she said quietly, watching him twirl one wave around his finger and then let it go. He began to withdraw his hand, but she stopped him with her own and drew it back. "You don't have to stop."

He couldn't help but be mildly confused. He didn't think she wanted him to do this, not again,

"Unless you want to," she added unexpectedly. He shook his head without hesitation. She smiled a little bit, then let the smile fall as she turned to him and asked, "It just because I'm the first woman you've been around in, like, forever?"

He furrowed his brows and moved his fingers from the ends of her hair to the pieces that framed her face, moving them away. He couldn't understand why she would think that. He saw no good reason why any man wouldn't want to touch her.

"You can be honest," she said. "I get it if that's what it is."

She was genuinely on the verge of making his head hurt. "What the hell are you talking about?"

His bewildered response made her laugh and cover her face with her hand. "I don't know. I really don't. I have no idea what I'm saying when you look at me like that."

"I'll stop if you want me to," he replied. By now his hand had ended up back where it began, at the ends of her hair.

She shook her head, leaning it back against the couch, angling towards him more. "Don't."

Taking her cue, he left her hair and ran his fingertips over her cheek, looking at her lips and wondering if he would feel the same things he'd felt last night when he kissed her if he did it again. He moved his thumb over her lower lip, staring at it and not seeing how she was looking at him, only partially noticing how her breathing was picking up.

To his surprise, before he could decide what to do next and if he should satisfy his curiosity, she reached out, buried her fingers in his hair at the back of head, and pulled him down for a kiss that almost knocked the wind out of him.

Laid to rest were any thoughts of the previous night being an anomaly. The same rush, the same wonder, the same awakened instincts sprung to life the very moment her lips touched his, and suddenly, he couldn't get close enough. Quickly lost in the taste of her kiss, barely a moment had passed before his left arm shot behind her and made a whizzing sound as it locked around her waist and rapidly pulled her to his lap. She gasped in surprise and then laughed, her hands holding on to his shoulders for balance when the movement broke their kiss.

"That's so weird," she breathed, taking his face in her hands and kissing him again. He almost apologized, but her tongue wrestled his to silence, and it was much better than talking. Kissing her didn't feel like the foreign, brand new thing that it had last night; now it felt natural, normal, something that was second nature and familiar, but it was no less thrilling. In fact, the thrill seemed to eclipse the first time.

He could feel more of her this time, if only due to the different position, and it brought more tension than he knew to expect. The way that she pushed against him as his hands moved to her waist and his mouth assaulted hers was new, leading his left arm to again lock around her waist and pull her as close as he possibly could. This led to a strangled, gasping sound being released against his lips, and as his mind went fully blank and body took over, he reveled in the sheer addictiveness of feeling this way.

She was all but panting for air when she broke away, and he took the opportunity to move his attention to her neck, as she had done to him the previous night. He wasn't as gentle as she had been, though, and she showed no signs of protests as he unknowingly left her a few reminders for the next day.

She pulled his lips back to hers, and he felt her shiver when his metal fingertips slipped just under the back of her shirt. He opened his eyes to check for her reaction - he wasn't sure what to do with that hand most of the time. She seemed to understand the unspoken question and said, "It's okay. I kinda like it."

He responded by sliding the hand up further, while his other hand worked on making her hair a mess. He couldn't feel with his left like he could with his right, but her skin was just as soft and warm under metal as it was under flesh. He reminded himself to be careful, however, and apologized to the fading bruise on her shoulder by pulling down the short sleeve of her shirt and kissing the almost-healed skin.

Then he looked up at her, and she was looking at him in a way that brought a sobriety to the once-frantic moment. She smiled gently at him and gathered his hair away from his face, holding it behind his head in one hand and saying in a soft voice, "When you go... when you leave, don't forget me, okay?"

He nodded at her, full sincerity in his eyes, but he could tell that she didn't believe him. She looked at him with a subtle, hidden sadness behind her eyes, then wrapped her arms around his shoulders and simply hugged him, resting her head on his shoulder.

He held her close, returning her unexpected embrace, closing his eyes and knowing full well that he didn't deserve to feel half as alive as he did from her touch.

* * *

She didn't wake up screaming the next morning, but she did awake gasping after escaping another nightmare. She also awoke far too early for her own good, but she knew she'd never fall back asleep at that point.

Instead, after lying in bed long enough to replay her latest bad but incredibly enjoyable decision and dread looking in the mirror and seeing what he'd done to her neck, she dragged herself out of bed and decided to just clean the house until David woke up. If nothing else, it would give her a solid few hours to mentally lecture herself to stop making out with Bucky before she really made life terrible for herself.

She didn't get the chance to do that, though, because she found him wide awake and alert, sitting at her kitchen table with his metal arm resting on it, his eyes betraying his current state of deep thinking as he stared out in front of him.

Before she could croak out a half-coherent "good morning", he looked up at her with uncertain but determined eyes and asked her a question. "Can you try to... call him?"

She blinked a few times, her sluggish brain trying to catch up with him. "Steve Rogers?"

He nodded. She was happy and sad at the same time. She was happy for him because this really was huge progress for him, and it meant that his chances of actually getting better were exponentially higher than if he'd chosen to just run off on his own. But this also meant that he really would be gone very soon, and she had only herself to blame for how much that idea now bothered now.

Still, she smiled. She knew this was what was best. "Of course I will."

**A/N: Thank you guys so much for the response to the last chapter! I'm glad you guys liked it, and I am super grateful to all of you who have been following this story. I just realized that after this chapter there's technically only three left. But I am writing a sequel, much more slowly than I wrote this story, so whenever I start to post it, updates will come a lot slower than they are now, and continuing it depends as always on how much writing time I have which tends to always change suddenly, but anyway, just wanted to mention the sequel in case anybody's interested :) Oh and I haven't thanked midnightwings96 in the last couple chapters, so I must reiterate my thanks to her for always helping me out and giving ideas and just being generally awesome :D See you all in a few days! :)**


	10. Chapter 10

Captain America was not easy to get on the phone.

First, she tried looking up his contact information online, and found a number on one of SHIELD's leaked files. Knowing the chances of the number still being active was just about zero, she gave it a call and found it predictably disconnected. Next, she tried to Google-stalk him and see if his whereabouts were currently known by anyone, and they weren't - he'd apparently gone slightly off the grid after being released from the hospital a few weeks earlier.

This led her to attempt something that she had next to no hope of bearing any fruit. She started calling Stark Tower in New York, asking anyone who would answer if they could put her through to someone who could give Steve Rogers an urgent message. She called each available number for each available office listing - which was a lot - and each time, she got either laughed at or cursed at and was then hung up on.

Bucky left her alone while she did this, scribbling in his notebook in the living room, seeming anxious and uneasy about it all. But while he was nervous, Summer was getting pissed off.

"Look," she argued with the latest irritated receptionist, "I don't know who else to call - SHIELD is gone and it's not like the Avengers have a tip hotline that I can call. I have actual important information for Captain America and I can promise you that it's something he wants to know about."

"Yeah, I'm sure. Look, lady, you wouldn't believe how many calls we get from people saying the same thing, and you know what we do? Nothing, and you know why?"

"Because you're all idiots?" she guessed before hanging up, glaring at her phone and dropping it on the table. She sighed, knowing that this strategy was not going to work, because it wasn't actually a strategy. She was dealing with superhero stuff, suddenly, and maybe getting one on the phone didn't involve the honest approach.

She picked up the phone again, staring at it and trying to brainstorm. What could she say that would get somebody to actually pay attention to her? What could she do to actually talk to somebody important and not some hourly-paid receptionist with a bad attitude?

It took her a few moments, but she finally got an idea. She didn't think it would work, but it was worth a shot, and she had nothing to lose at this point. She picked up the phone, dialed the tower's number and an extension that supposedly led to the the main office of the CEO, though she doubted that, and put the phone to her ear, hoping her lying skills weren't too atrocious.

"Stark Industries, how may I direct your call," a bored-sounding female voice answered.

Putting on a business voice that sounded laughable to her own ears, she replied, "Yes, I have an eleven o'clock conference with Ms. Potts."

There was a brief pause on the other end and then the woman replied, "Ms. Potts doesn't have any appointments today until noon. May I ask your name?"

Summer crossed her fingers. "My name is Summer McAdams and I am a... assistant professor of engineering from the University of Virginia. I can assure you that I have an appointment with Ms. Potts and I can also tell you that the last receptionist who delayed my appointment was fired for her incompetence."

"One moment please."

Summer held her breath, ready to keel over in shock if this actually worked. She waited for the line to drop and instead heard a faint click, and then a new woman's voice.

"Pepper Potts."

Her jaw dropped. She was so shocked at her own success that she forgot to speak.

"Hello?"

"Hi," she half-exclaimed, then cleared her throat. "Hello."

"I don't have anything in my book about an appointment with... what was your name again?"

"Summer," she replied. "Summer McAdams. And I know you don't - just please don't hang up. I have some extremely important information that I need to get to Steve Rogers and I had no idea how else to try to get someone who knows him to listen to me."

"Who are you? Are you with SHIELD?"

"No," she almost laughed. "I'm a single mother and I live in the middle of the woods in Falls Church, Virginia."

"Not to be rude, but what information could you possibly have that's so urgent? And if that's true, why did you lie to get through?"

"Because I tried being honest and fifteen different people hung up on me," she explained. Then she held her breath again and decided to just blurt it out and see what happened. "I have the winter soldier living with me. He's been living here for almost a month and -"

"Wait," Pepper interrupted, "you're telling me that you have that... man... living with you? In your house?"

"I can send you a photo if you don't believe me."

"Why are you calling me and not the police?"

She rolled her eyes. "Because I don't trust anyone in a position of authority now, and I'm pretty sure you can guess why. He's not a threat. He's... hurt, and he needs help. I need Steve Rogers to know that he's here and he remembers things, and he wants his help."

The other woman paused. "Send me a picture."

"Okay," Summer replied, getting up and walking into the living room. Bucky looked up from his notebook when he heard her footsteps, and she quickly held out her phone and snapped a picture. He stared at her in confusion while she put the phone back to her ear and walked away. "I need a number to send it to."

Pepper rattled off a number, and Summer pulled the phone away and tapped some buttons, sending the picture. Then she placed the phone back to her ear. "It's sent."

"All right," Pepper replied. "Look, I'm not sure if you're trying to pull some prank, or for all I know, you're HYDRA and you're trying to lead Steve into a trap. I don't know. It's been a weird month. But I'll tell Tony and let him decide what to do."

Summer closed her eyes and exhaled. "Thank you. And for the record, I'm not HYDRA. I lost a grandfather in the Holocaust. I hate Nazis."

"Then why is one living with you?"

"He's not a Nazi," Summer replied. "He doesn't know what he is."

Another pause, and then Pepper said, "I'll give Tony a call."

"Thank you. Really, thank you."

"All right. Bye."

Summer hung up, sighing and in shock that she'd actually gotten as far as she had. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she looked up and to her right to find Bucky watching her, having drifted out of the living room, looking slightly concerned and still quite anxious.

"I managed to talk to Tony Stark's girlfriend, somehow," she reported cheerfully, motioning for him to sit down near her. As he did so, she went on. "She's going to tell him, and as long as he doesn't think I'm full of crap or trying to pull a prank, I guess he'll tell him."

Bucky stared at the table for a moment, then looked up at her and said quietly, "Stark?"

"Yeah, Tony Stark," she replied. "Iron Man. I figured getting in touch with one of the Avengers was the best way to do this, and he's the only one who really has an office that anyone can call."

"I know that name."

"Oh." She watched as Bucky seemed to really dig deep for that name, judging by the concentration on his face. Then it clicked. "Oh! Maybe you used to know Howard Stark. That's his dad."

For a split second, his face relaxed with recognition, and she knew that she had guessed right. But then he visibly paled, and his eyes darkened as they lost focus again.

That couldn't be a good sign. She reached a hand out to touch his own, as she had the day before when he'd started drifting away, but this time, he jerked his hand away at the first contact. He clenched it into a fist and then dropped it into his lap, and she looked up at him in concern. "You okay?"

His jaw clenched, he looked like he was about to break something or start cursing in Russian, but whatever he was going to do was interrupted by her phone ringing. They both froze, and she peered at the caller I.D, which announced an unknown caller.

Well, that was fast. She answered it quickly. "Hello?"

"Yeah, I'm looking for... something McAdams. Rachel McAdams? You were great in the Notebook, if that's who this is."

And just like that, in two sentences, everything she'd ever read about Tony Stark was confirmed as very true. "Summer McAdams. Hi."

"Oh, bummer. Hi. I hear you've got an extremely deadly old man in your house. Looked like him in the picture. Are you making this up?"

"No, sir," she replied.

"Good, because I'm only taking this halfway seriously because I promised a friend I'd keep an eye out for information about this guy. And if you're lying just to try to meet the Capsicle of your dreams, I will personally make you live to regret it."

He said it so causally, it was hard to tell if he was joking or serious.

"I mean it."

Serious, then. "I understand. I'm not lying."

"Although you did lie to get through to Pepper," he pointed out.

"Nobody took me serious the first fifteen times that I called and tried to be honest," she shrugged, glancing at Bucky as he watched her carefully.

"Right. So are you his hostage? Are you hiding in a cabinet to talk to me right now? Because you should have called the police instead."

"No. He hasn't tried to hurt me or my son once. He just needs help remembering and... getting better." Bucky looked away as she said the last few words.

"Mmhmm. Normally I'd say you're nuts, but I've seen some of the files about this guy, and it reminds me of something that happened to a guy I know."

"All I want is for you to pass the message along to Steve Rogers. That's all."

There was a pause, and then Tony said, "You know what he's done, right? The Winter Soldier?"

"I... yeah, some of it."

"I grew up my whole life thinking my mom and dad died in a car accident. Found out a week ago that they were assassinated, and you'll never guess by who."

Her stomach twisted, suddenly understanding why Bucky had looked so distressed at the sound of Howard Stark's name. He must have just remembered.

"Latest rumor is that he killed JFK too. So I'm more than a little skeptical that he's just been hanging out in your house with you, totally harmless, even if he was brainwashed."

She drew a breath, starting to feel a bit out of her depth again. She certainly never imagined ever being in a position like this, asking one of the world's richest and most famous men to help her help out his parents' assassin. How did things like this even happen? "I'm sorry, Mr. Stark. I don't know what else to say. I could spend all day telling you what I've seen and what I know about him, but you'd have no reason to believe me. For all you know I really am just a loser trying to get some attention, or I have Stockholm syndrome. But the truth is that he needs help. He saved my life and my little boy's life the other day when a couple of HYDRA agents found him at my house. He's... he just needs help. And he needs his friend."

She could feel Bucky's eyes back on her. She looked up and saw a slightly pained expression on his face, like her words were too undeserved and he didn't want to hear them.

"Hm. If you're making all this up, you should look into voice acting, because I almost think you're telling the truth."

"... So you'll tell him?"

"I'll shoot him a text."

Luck was on her side today, pure and simple. "Thank you."

"Uh huh. Last chance to admit that you're lying, and I'll let you off with five hundred pounds of eggs being dropped on your house. It would get the Guinness world record for most epic house egging in recorded history."

What a strange man. "I'm not lying."

"All right. Your fate is in your own hands. Catch you later, McDonald's."

She almost corrected him, but then thought better of it, not wanting to push her luck. "Thank you, Mr. Stark."

She hung up, placing the phone down, still a bit in disbelief that she'd just had a conversation with Tony Stark, and then she glanced at Bucky to find him staring off again, eyes a little wider than usual, brows furrowed tightly, jaw set. "Bucky?"

"This is a mistake."

"What is?"

"I can't trust him."

"Rogers?" she guessed.

He looked at her through a curtain of hair that had fallen in his face. "Anybody."

There was a wild sort of glint in his eyes, and she saw it for what it was - the spark of panic. "Bucky," she said slowly, "remember how we talked about this and you agreed. He's going to help you. He... he was your best friend."

Bucky shook his head, and she saw his shoulders and face tensing, knew that his hands were in fists in his lap without having to look.

She knew what she did when David would be on the verge of a meltdown, which was to distract him at all costs and maybe offer to let him do something that he normally didn't get to do if the usual distractions weren't working. But averting a meltdown in a grown man who had more issues than any of the case studies she'd ever read in her old psychology class was a bit different.

"Do you trust me?" she asked tentatively, drawing his eyes back to her. "I've given you no reason not to. I've helped you in every way that I can, and I only want the best for you. And I really think that this is what's best. Have I done anything to make you distrust me, or think that I'm not looking out for you?"

He looked down and blinked a few times, and she wasn't sure if anything she said could really help. It wouldn't stop her from trying, though. "Trust me on this, okay? And I think that deep down, somewhere, you know that he'll help you."

He gave her a fleeting glance, clearly no less tense than he was a moment ago, and she was wracking her brain trying to come up with a way to be at least somewhat helpful when little footsteps from the hall alerted her that David had woken up.

As Bucky continued to stare uneasily at nothing, Summer slowly got to her feet, then put a reassuring hand on his shoulder before turning to scoop David up into a hug.

She hoped that Captain America would call soon, before Bucky really did change his mind and disappear.

* * *

She kept her phone on her person all day, waiting for it to ring. Bucky kept his distance, never sitting still anywhere for very long, and the more she watched him come and go and go back and forth from one room to the next, the more she started to feel genuinely nervous for him.

When she took David outside later in the day to play for an hour or two, Bucky followed them out and then disappeared. He was still gone when the sun started to go down, and she started to fear that he wouldn't come back.

He did, however, offering no explanation for what he'd been doing, eating the dinner she made in silence and then retreating to her room. Meanwhile, she checked her phone obsessively, wondering if all of Bucky's anxiety would be for nothing due to the Avenger in question never even calling.

She watched the clock tick later and later, and she eventually gave up any hope of getting the call. That was why, as she was doing the dishes while David watched a movie in the living room, she almost let out a shriek at the sound of her phone ringing from her back pocket.

Hands dripping wet, she reached for the phone and then stopped, hastily half-drying her hands on a paper towel before grabbing the phone, almost dropping it, then looking at the screen. Another unknown caller.

She pressed it to her ear. "Hello?"

"Hi... Summer McAdams?" a slightly unsure-sounding male voice asked.

"Yeah," she confirmed.

"Steve Rogers. I got your message from Tony Stark." There was a pause, and then he asked, "Is it true?"

"Yeah," she said, glancing down the hallway, finding it still clear, and stepping out the front door a bit to get away from the sound of the TV. She couldn't believe that he had actually called, and that she was actually talking to Captain America on the phone. "He's been here for almost a month."

"How did he end up with you?"

He didn't seem to have the same problems believing her that Stark had. "I guess that he was trying to find a place to hide from HYDRA. He'd been shot a couple times, and I found him bleeding and knocked out in my front yard. Well, my son found him."

"Did he hurt you?"

"Not once," she replied. "I was scared to death of him at first and I tried to make him leave after a day or two. But... he really needed help."

There was a pause, and then he asked, "Has he... remembered anything?"

"Yeah," she replied. "He doesn't tell me any details, but I know he's remembered a lot. The first week, I pulled up some of his information online, and after he read it he... went into the forest outside my house and kind of broke a couple of trees."

"Stark said something about him saving your life."

"Yeah. A couple of agents found him here, and they had a gun to my son's head because I wouldn't tell them where he was. He killed them both and saved our lives." She shivered, unable to stop the sick feeling she got when she spoke of that night.

Another pause, and then he asked, "Does he know you're talking to me?"

"He asked me to call you," she replied.

"He did?"

The clear hope in his voice made her wince a little bit. To think she ever thought Steve Rogers might actually be a jerk under all that shiny patriotism and loyalty. "Yeah."

"Is... he okay? Physically? I know that his arm is broken..."

"He's fine," she replied. "The arm seems to be okay, though I don't know how. Bullets literally fell out of him, too. He couldn't eat at first, he threw up a lot. Now he eats enough for like four people. And he loves coffee. Drinks like two pots a day by himself." She heard a breathy sigh-like chuckle to that.

"The coffee part actually isn't surprising to me at all," he said. "All right. I can be there by morning. Is that okay?"

She tried not to gulp. David was going to be so starstruck that the universe might implode. And now she had to clean every inch of her house to prepare for a visit from Captain America. So much cleaning...

"Yeah, that's okay," she answered. "I can give you my address if you're ready."

"Stark kind of gave it to me already," he replied, sounding a bit chagrined. "He traced your location when you spoke earlier."

Fantastic. "Oh. It's just going to be you coming, right?"

"I have a friend with me, if that's all right. Have you seen the guy with the wings from the news footage?"

"Oh. Yeah, I have."

"He's with me. That's it."

"So... no cops or agents or anything?"

"Absolutely not," he said seriously. "I don't want him arrested or held by anybody. I just want to help him."

She breathed a sigh of relief. "Good."

There was a short silence, then Steve said, "Sounds like you care about him."

She chewed her lip slightly, trying not blush at a statement that should not have made her blush at all. "It's kind of impossible not to."

"I'm glad you do," Steve said. "I'm glad he found help. I'll be there in the morning."

"Okay," she nodded. "Thank you."

"I should be thanking you," he replied. "I've been looking for him and finding nothing until today."

"Well... I'm glad I could help," she said somewhat clumsily. It was all surreal, beyond surreal.

"All right. I look forward to meeting you tomorrow."

"Me too."

"Bye."

"Bye," she said, hanging up and staring at her phone for a minute, letting it all sink in. She'd talked to Iron Man and Captain America on the phone today. And Captain America had thanked her for helping out his troubled friend. And her son would be meeting his hero in the morning.

And she needed to start cleaning.

Stepping out of the doorway, she closed the door and then turned around, jumping a little when she saw Bucky standing there, in the middle of the kitchen, watching her with an unreadable expression.

"Um... that was him," she said, gesturing to the phone in her hand. "He said he'd be here in the morning."

Bucky stared at her for a moment, then looked towards the floor for a moment before turning back towards the hallway.

She frowned at his sudden departure, more so when she heard her bedroom door close. She didn't go after him, though, because she could only imagine the unease he had to feel now, knowing that Steve was officially coming the following morning. She would leave him be, but only for now; she would make sure to check on him before she turned in for the night.

"David," she said in a slightly sing-song tone, walking into the living room. "You'll never guess who you get to meet tomorrow."

* * *

Later that night, Summer was cleaning. David was sleeping. Bucky was in the throes of a nightmare a bit different from his usual fare.

Lack of substantial sleep for the last few nights had led him to falling asleep unexpectedly, putting an end to what had been a myriad of dark thoughts swirling in the silence of his solitude. They spilled over into his dreams.

_He saw cold, cruel eyes set in an aging face, under gray-blonde hair, watching him expectantly as he sat vacant-eyed in the despicable, torturous chair._

_There were words, blurring together and only half-reaching his ears, but he knew what they were, knew that they were demands for his mission report, and he knew he wouldn't give it._

_He felt the backhanded slap before it came, knew what the rest of this scene had in store from the beginning. Face stinging, he turned back to the man he had grown to passionately hate, then felt his eyes widen and lips part when he found Steve Rogers staring back at him._

_"Bucky?"_

_Steve was dressed as he had been on the bridge, staring at him with the same bewildered expression, and for a moment, Bucky had hope; maybe this would end differently, without the pain and shock of the chair, and instead end with Steve helping him escape._

_But then Steve looked down, and his expression became one of horror as he took a step back. Bucky looked down, following the other man's eyes to his own hands, which he discovered to be covered in a thick layer of sticky, warm blood. His stomach turned and his face contorted when the blood seemed to self-replenish itself, falling from his hands in a cascade that had no clear source, splashing the floor and covering his boot-clad feet. He looked up, his eyes desperate as they fell again upon Steve, who was now holding the limp body of a blonde little girl in his arms. Her pale, lifeless face and pink birthday party hat on her head was splattered with the same blood drenching his hands, and as vomit rose in his throat, Steve looked at him with nothing but disgust and hatred in his eyes. It still didn't match the hatred he felt towards himself._

_He looked down again, at hands that brought nothing but death, and when he looked up again, Steve and the girl was gone. In their place was Summer, sitting on the floor crying, clutching her boy in her arms, who was bleeding from a single gunshot wound to his right temple._

_This wasn't right. He stood up, determined to put an end to this, but then hands shot out from the shadows and grabbed him, pushing him down and forcing him back into the chair. The restraints snapped into place and he couldn't move; he knew what came next._

_He didn't wait for the bite guard or the electric sparks of the machine to start screaming, but it made no difference. He couldn't stop it, couldn't change his future anymore than his past, and this was what was always waiting at the end of the line - confusion, misery, death by his hand, and all that he knew, erased in a surge of excruciating pain. All that would remain, all that would ever come next, was pure, biting, brutal, cruel, inescapable cold... _

He woke up to the sound of screaming, and this time it was his own voice piercing his ears. He was face-down on the pillows, both of his hands clenched into tight fists that gripped the skewed sheets beneath them. They'd torn a little bit thanks to his clawing, but it was far beyond his notice as his eyes opened fully and he pushed off the bed, sitting up and holding his head in his hands as his breath came in heavy gasps.

To say that he was sick of this was a gross understatement. Nightmares like that were why he only slept a few hours each night, and he didn't see them ever leaving. This one had been different, though, and remembering now that Steve would be coming in the morning made the aftermath feel even worse.

A soft knock at the door drew his attention. He let go of his head and looked up, unsure of what to do. Then the knob twisted and the door cracked open, revealing familiar blue eyes peering inside cautiously.

When their eyes met, she opened the door more fully and took a cautious step inside. "Sorry, I heard you and just... wanted to make sure that you were okay."

She held out a cup in her hands and showed it as she walked inside, keeping her eyes away mostly as he watched every step she took. She put the cup down on the table next to her bed, then turned to him and gave him a weak smile.

She'd never done this before, and he had woken up like this more times than he cared to count. His question must have showed in his eyes, because she said quietly, "You picked me up bleeding and crying from my bathroom floor. Least I can do is offer to talk if it helps you sleep better."

He knew she couldn't help, so he looked away, averting his eyes to face forward. But that only worked until he felt the bed depress to his left, only inches away from him, and he glanced there to find her sitting down on the edge. With her this close, he couldn't look away quite so easily.

"I'm going to tell you something I never would have thought I'd say when you first came here," she said with a small smile. "I'm gonna miss you."

She really was ridiculous. What was there to miss? In what way had he not burdened her and put her in danger since he first showed up here?

Her hand on his cheek drew him back when he started to drift off, staring at the air. His gaze met hers, and she asked softly, "What do you think about when you stare off like that?"

His brows furrowed a bit as he searched for words to answer her with. "Faces. Words. Flashes of things I can almost remember. Things I do remember."

"And wish you didn't?" she guessed. He nodded. "Do you dream of your memories? Is that why you always wake up like this?"

"Usually," he muttered. "Tonight was different."

"You can tell me," she gently reminded him.

He looked at her, his expression becoming pained, her words bringing back to the forefront the cause of the night's dream. "You would hate me as much as I do if I told you."

She shook her head, frowning deeply. "Those things weren't your choice. When you did have a choice and knew who you were, you were a hero."

He felt his chest tightening. That was who she saw, the former hero that he could barely remember, not the monster that hero had been warped into. But when the vast majority of his memories were of the monster, of blood and death and suffering inflicted by his own hand, how could he see anything but that? Surely Steve was the same way, and he was willing to help him now because of who he used to be, but once all of the truth came to light and they all saw the entirety of what the Winter Soldier had done, it would be too much. He knew it, because it was too much for him to bear himself, and he didn't even have close to the full picture yet himself.

He was too tired and too sick of it all to close himself off to her like he normally would have. Previously nonexistent human weakness led his lips to loosen. "He'll hate me. I know he will. I can't... be... what he remembers."

He was startled slightly when he felt her hand entwine with his - his left instead of his right. "I'm willing to bet that he knows that. And I also bet that he's different now, too. It's okay to be different. What matters now is what you do with your choices now that you have them back."

"I don't know what to do," he admitted. "All I know is how to kill."

"That's not true," she replied. "You know how to speak different languages. You've learned how to wash dishes. You're also pretty good at kissing considering you probably didn't get much practice after the 40's."

She blushed a little on that last part, then smiled at him. He just stared at her like he didn't understand her, because he didn't.

"That's part of why you should let him help you," she added. "He knows who you really are underneath everything they did to you. He can help you get that back."

"And what if he can't?" he challenged, a slight edge of desperation in his tone. "What if this is all I'll ever be?"

"You're more than you think you are," she said quietly. "I know you hate yourself, but I look at you and I see the man who saved my baby's life."

"He was in danger because of me," he pointed out.

"I know. But if you really were this monstrous thing... you wouldn't have saved him. And like I've said before... you wouldn't be hurting this badly."

He looked down at their hands, her warmth on his cold, unnatural, ugly and inescapable reminder of what he'd been made into, and he wondered what would have happened had he not accidentally fallen into this woman's life. As dark of a place as his mind was, it was not the barely-functional, often-glitching thing it had been when he had been running from D.C., when he was blacking out and throwing up and struggling just to stay online. To walk, talk, eat, and sleep (some) were all accomplishments on their own, and of course, he owed them to her. He owed her a lot of things.

"Why will you miss me?" he asked, looking up after studying their hands for awhile.

She opened her mouth, then closed it, then opened it again, blushing faintly. "Well... I've been so used to being alone for so long. Once that first week was over, having someone around has been... nice. I let myself get used to having more company. Even though you didn't really talk for a long time. And David's really taken to you. I think it's been good for him to have a man around for once in his life. I haven't had one around, in gosh, I'm not sure how long, I think not since my dad when I was little..."

She was rambling, and he almost wanted to grin at the way she nervously spat out words when a question made her uncomfortable. Instead, he let his eyes flicker down to her lips, and he knew she saw him do it. He didn't care. Her lips were almost as nice to look at as they were to kiss. He'd miss doing that.

He looked back up to her eyes and found them lower than he expected. She was looking at his left shoulder, at the thick and violent scarring that marked where metal had been forcibly joined to flesh, and he suddenly wished that he'd worn a shirt to bed. If it was any other part of him, he wouldn't care about the exposure, but those scars and that arm made him angry and nauseous whenever he caught a glimpse. He didn't want her eyes trained on a part of himself that he so hated.

But she didn't just look. Soon her soft, brave fingertips reached out and closed the small distance between them, touching the damaged skin gently. He shivered a little, looking away and shifting backwards to escape her touch.

"I'm sorry," she half-whispered, letting the hand fall a few inches lower, to skin that he didn't mind her fingers on. He looked back to her, and she blinked a few times before drawing her hand back. "Um..."

She flustered so easily. He reached up with his right hand to her face, brushing aside some hair and placing it behind her ear, watching her tense and hold her breath at that small touch. He had no idea what she possibly saw in him to allow him to touch her and kiss her on occasion, but whatever it was, he wouldn't question it out loud for fear of jinxing it.

He barely realized that he had drawn closer to her until he felt her warm breath ghost across his lips. He looked down to her mouth and closed his eyes as he enjoyed the proximity, the warmth and the scent of her, the way that he didn't think when he was close to her like this. Giving in, he leaned forward, determined to kiss her once more while he still could.

But, this time, she jerked away at the last minute. He opened his eyes and looked at her with a confused expression that did nothing to hide the sudden woundedness behind it.

* * *

The way that he looked at her following her knee-jerk reaction made her heart drop. The inward beating up of herself began immediately; he'd just opened himself up to her in a way that was unprecedented, and this was not the right way to respond.

"I'm sorry," she said quietly, feeling suddenly bereft as his hand withdrew from her and his eyes fell away. "It's just... you're leaving, and..."

His eyes met hers again, and she blinked at what she saw in those volatile blue depths. He looked like he'd just been slapped, and now bore the shame of it in his eyes. She swallowed down her horror at the idea of causing him that kind of distress for what now felt like a stupid reason.

"I'm sorry," she repeated. When he kept his gaze pointedly away and shifted away from her, she half-pleaded, "Please don't do that. I just... freaked out for a minute."

When he had no response and still refused to look at her, she knew she was going to end up doing either one of two things - rambling until she embarrassed them both, or pulling him into a hug to show him that her moment of self-preservation died with one look from him. Whatever that meant for her, she could deal with later, when she was alone and could kick herself to her heart's content.

She went with the hug option.

He was stiff at first, but he relaxed against her relatively quickly. His arms stayed limp, his hands in his lap, but his head inclined towards hers and she felt him nuzzle her hair as she held him in a tight embrace. She tried not to think about how close they were, how so very shirtless he was and how tempting the thought was to let her hands wander to non-hug-zones, but it was hard to ignore when his breath was tickling her ear and she was feeling far too fluttery for her own good.

She didn't expect him to speak, but he did, and the broken, low tone of his voice flowing directly into her ear as his lips grazed it was enough on it's own to make her heart flip.

"Kissing you helps me forget."

At those words, she stilled, forgetting how to breathe for a moment, then pulled away to look in his eyes. They were fixed on the wall behind her, still looking ashamed for some reason, and she thought she would start shedding tears soon if she had to look at it any longer.

She'd seen great flashes of humanity in his eyes during their two previous heated moments, a shadow of what he'd once been - a man and not a machine - springing to life while those moments lasted. It was why she didn't regret kissing him those times - he had so little of himself in his own possession, and he seemed to gain a piece of himself back when she reminded him of just how very human he still was.

And so, throwing out the window the little voice telling her to stop making his impending departure harder on herself, she brought both hands to his face and forced his eyes back to hers, deciding that for all that she owed him, helping him forget the horrors for a little while was the very least she could do and one of the very few things she had the power to do.

Her lips met his softly, slowly, and as he forgot, she wondered if he had any idea how he was searing himself into her memory.

**A/N: two chapters left after this :) Well, technically, one chapter and an epilogue. Reading over this chapter, I am super meh about about how I wrote Pepper, but I blame that on having never written her before. Hopefully she wasn't too horribly off. Anyway, my usual big thank you to all of you wonderful readers &amp; reviewers, thank you so much for sticking with this story :D as usual, see you all in a few days! :D **


	11. Chapter 11

Bucky didn't sleep. Neither did Summer. By the time morning came, her house was absolutely sparkling and she was a nervous wreck, hopped up on caffeine and jumping at every last sound she heard, checking out the windows more times than she would ever admit.

Steve Rogers had said he'd be there in the morning, and that meant different things to different people. She considered morning to generally mean around 9 AM, but since Steve was a big time super-important super-guy, maybe his "morning" was more like 6 or 7. Thus, too much thinking and no sleep.

By the time 8 AM came, she had coffee brewing and she heard her bathroom door click shut. She peered down the hallway and saw her bedroom door open, so she hurried down and crept inside of it to dig into her closet for new clothes.

What did one wear when they were about to meet the world's first Avenger and his random winged buddy? She started looking through what she considered to be her "nice" section of the closet, then paused when she wondered if Bucky would take offense to her dressing nicely for Steve's arrival when she'd spent his entire visit in her causal, comfy stuff. But would he even notice at all?

Probably, she had to admit. She spent large portions of the day trying to ignore the way he looked at her. All of her. His notions of subtlety were as nonexistent as his social skills. It was why she'd been wearing her good, fairly uncomfortable bras rather than the broken-in old reliables. Not that she'd admit it.

She sighed and focused on the task at hand. She needed something in between, something that didn't make her look like a hobo or a fangirl who'd casually thrown on a dress and a face full of makeup just because no reason at all. Because she wasn't a fangirl, at least no more than any other decent female American citizen was. He was a fantastic male specimen, of course, but the blonde all-American look had never appealed to her as much as the darker, more interesting types...

On cue, she sensed rather than heard the footsteps of where her last thought had been naturally headed, and she looked over her shoulder to see Bucky walking back inside of her room, eyeing her with slight curiosity. She tried to swallow down a lump in her throat, which was absolutely not a result of the eye contact or the way her eyes couldn't help themselves from drifting downwards to appreciate how even better his shirtless form looked in the morning light.

She glanced up back up and quickly looked back into her closet. His lack of subtlety had clearly rubbed off on her. And she still had no idea what to wear. Trying to choose or focus at all seemed even harder with his presence looming. It was a heavy thing, something that felt almost oppressive until it was gone, leaving a distinct emptiness in its wake.

She heard rustling of fabric behind her, hoped to God that he was putting clothes on and not taking more off, determined not to look either way. Giving up on being able to think at the moment, she reached jittery sleep-deprived fingers to a thin, neutral gray sweater, figuring it was good enough, then grabbed a few more items and turned to hurry out. She was relieved to find Bucky fully clothed, sitting on the edge of her bed in jeans and the black hoodie that used to belong to David's father, and as she relaxed a little mentally, she stopped in the middle of her room and said, "I made pancakes, if you're hungry. I made a lot of pancakes. Like five batches. So have as many as you'd like."

A slight nod was her answer, and she gave him a small smile before turning again and heading to her bathroom. He didn't look as anxious as he had yesterday, but exhaustion seemed to have been what had taken its place. She doubted he'd slept at all after she'd left him late last night.

She tried to push the thought away as she dressed and wrestled her hair into a ponytail, but she thought she should know better by now than to try. Each new day seemed to bring with it new memories that would make her skin tingle and lips burn the next day. Though the kisses they'd shared had been less desperate than the previous ones, they were sweeter and slower, and so much worse because of it. He'd been vulnerable and she had felt how much he hated it, but soft and gentle touches seemed to bring him at least some degree of peace. Or maybe it was a distraction, and as he said himself, a way to forget. Maybe that was the only kind of peace he could get.

Lost in thought, she finished in the bathroom and opened the door, stopping short when she found Bucky coming out of her room, placing them within inches of each other. She managed to recover relatively quickly, escaping his always-intense gaze and moving towards the kitchen. He followed, and she checked the time on her phone; 8:30, and still no sign of Captain America.

While David still slept, she and Bucky ate in silence. She ate a reasonable amount of pancakes, and he ate enough for an entire small family. Regardless of the cash-draining effects of his appetite, it was at least nice to see somebody appreciate her cooking to that degree.

She was in the middle of texting her brother when a very slight, quiet wooshing sound made it to her ears from across the table. She glanced up, heart skipping when she saw Bucky flipping a knife in his right hand, one that she'd given him to eat with but had remained unused. He stared at nothing in particular as he tossed it, caught it, rolled it, and spun it with such a distinct lack of effort that she found herself staring, utterly mesmerized. Never mind that she'd seen firsthand how deadly he was with a knife and that any sane person would probably be slightly concerned at this particular moment. His skilled fingers were dizzying to watch, especially when her brain took the term "skilled fingers" and ran with it to places that were better left abandoned...

The sound of a car door slamming outside made her jump and him grip the knife mid-spin, then set it down on the table. Their eyes met, and she could almost feel his previously stabilized anxiety spike to new levels.

They didn't look away until there was a knock at the door. She quickly stood up, her own nervousness suddenly back and raging as she almost tripped over her own feet trying to get to the door. Once she got there, she grabbed the knob and glanced one more time at Bucky, who suddenly looked pale, and then drew a breath before opening the door.

And then there he was, the guy whose face was all over her son's room, the world's youngest 95 year old man, greeting her with a cautious but hopeful smile. "Hi. You must be Summer."

The man behind him wasted no time in scanning the house as best as he could from the outside, but she didn't notice. She suddenly couldn't talk and felt like she was twelve years old, at least until she shook herself out of it and realized he was offering her his hand. "Yeah," she smiled, taking his hand and shaking it, dying a little inside of embarrassment.

"I'm Steve Rogers," he said, completely unnecessarily, "and this is my friend, Sam Wilson."

Her eyes glanced to his friend, who quickly flashed her a smile. "How you doing?"

"... Good," she replied, words unable to describe the level of surreal that that moment was. "Uh... come in, sorry."

Already cringing at herself, she stepped aside to let them in and glanced at Bucky, only to find him gone and his chair vacant. She looked quickly to the hallway and the to the living room, finding no trace of him, and as the two very tall, rather large men stepped inside her house, she frowned and said, "He was just here, just a second ago."

"Did he split?" Sam asked, mostly to himself, looking around while Steve got a slightly crestfallen look on his face. "You want to go check for him?"

Steve looked at a loss for a moment, then looked at Summer, and she realized that he was looking to her for a suggestion. Narrowly avoiding falling into a stupor over that, she said, "He probably just... I'm sure he's still here. I'd wait for him to come back out here on his own. It's taken a lot for him to get to this point."

While Steve frowned at that, Sam raised an eyebrow and asked, "He is actually here, right?"

She sighed, a little frustrated that only Steve seemed to be capable of believing her. She gestured to the buffet of pancakes on her kitchen counter and said, "I made fifty pancakes this morning. There's only about twenty left. That should be proof enough."

Sam glanced at the pile of food and raised his hands in mock-surrender. "Hey, can't blame me for asking. We're all having some major trust issues lately."

Summer then glanced to Steve, who looked a little lost as he stood there, looking around and appearing as nervous as Bucky had.

"Well... why don't you two have a seat in the living room while we wait," she said, ushering them out of the kitchen. "He's probably just getting his nerve up. I'll go look for him if he doesn't come back in a few minutes."

Steve nodded, and as she led them to the adjoining room, she noticed Sam eyeing her peculiarly from the corner of her eye, but she ignored it until he asked her a question. "You married? Got a boyfriend?"

"No," she answered quickly, looking up and finding a suspicious look on his face.

He dropped his eyes pointedly to the left side her neck, which was quite unthinkingly exposed due to her ponytail, and she suddenly realized, with slight horror, what he was looking at. He met her eyes again and asked, "Really?"

Steve apparently hadn't paid any attention to the exchange, and she was grateful for that. Feeling like her face was on fire, the very second that both men were seated, she said, "Uh - actually, I'll go check on him now, if you guys don't mind," then darted out of the room.

She could only imagine what the Sam guy would think of her now, and even she had to admit how it looked to have obvious marks on her neck in her current living situation. He probably either thought her a desperate slut or a rape victim, the latter of which was not a title she had any interest in dealing with again, and the last thing Bucky needed was suspicion from anyone that he'd added forcing himself on a woman to his rather horrifying resume.

But, as she reached the bathroom - which was closed with the light on - she decided not to care what some guy who was not Steve Rogers thought of her. She didn't regret a thing, and after she got a few minutes to wrap her head around it, she found that she was actually rather angry about it. The guy had no idea what either her or Bucky had been through in the last month, and for that question to be one of the first things out his mouth when there were much bigger issues at hand was a little maddening.

But there were bigger things to worry about than Sam's line of questioning. She sighed and raised her knuckles to the bathroom door, focusing on the person that she really needed to be concerned with at the moment.

She knocked gently, and called even gentler, "Bucky?"

* * *

He gripped the sink, staring at his reflection in the mirror and fighting with himself. He hadn't exactly meant to run away like a coward. It had just happened, in a sudden burst of panic and lack of trust towards anyone (including himself), which led him here, contemplating smashing a hole through the house and escaping while he still could.

A voice in his head - the same quiet one that had guided his actions with Summer - seemed so assured that he could trust Steve, and it seemed like a such a natural thing, to believe that the man really was there to help him. But there was another side of him, the currently extremely prevalent one that had been abused and manipulated by every human being he'd encountered since 1945, and that voice told him to run and trust nobody because what if the end result was somehow ending up back in HYDRA's claws? He was a fugitive, and Rogers was from SHIELD; it could all be a plot to turn him over rot in a cell, or even worse, in the hands of those who had controlled him all this time...

But then there was another voice, that softer one that wasn't a product of his own mind, calling his name through the door and stopping him before the wall-smashing idea could come to fruition. He stopped and looked up in the mirror, fighting a wince at his own bedraggled reflection, then glancing at the doorknob as it turned slowly and then gave way to the door opening. He looked away as she stepped inside, but he turned curious eyes on her when she closed the door behind her.

She looked at him and then glanced in the mirror, examining her neck for a moment before muttering, "These things you gave me are getting me into trouble." Then she turned to him and said, "He's waiting for you."

He shook his head slightly and turned back to the mirror. "I... this is a mistake."

"You won't know that until you give him a chance," she replied. She then surprised him by taking both of his hands in hers, and their eyes met as she spoke. "I'm just a stranger to you. I read about you in sixth grade in a history book and didn't know you until you showed up half dead on my property. I spent almost every waking moment waiting for you to snap and kill us. And now I'm... well, it's a lot different now," she said, squirming a little as she said that part. "My point is, he was your best friend. He doesn't have any of those issues to get past. He actually looked a little heartbroken when he came in and didn't see you."

Whatever nice, comforting words she said, he couldn't wrap his mind around actually facing the man. He felt such a deep, inherent shame at the thought, and the same overwhelming surge of emotion that was hard to trace through the mire of his mind but was responsible for his saving of Rogers after his fall from the helicarrier. He knew, just knew with all of his being without having to know the details or have all of the memories, how important Steve was and how important he had always been. But that was precisely why he was hiding, and suddenly it hit him why the thought of facing him seemed so utterly painful and impossible.

Bucky had let him down.

Whoever he had been was still around somewhere inside, imperceptible before but making its small presence known by bringing this fact to light, offering it up to his mind like a peace offering of understanding. Steve was the living representation of all the good in himself that had been forcibly taken from him, all the happiness and innocence he'd once had, and to look at him now through eyes that had watched stonelike as he ended the lives of HYDRA's enemies seemed unthinkable.

"Hey, don't drift off right now," said Summer's gentle voice, a light squeezing of her hands bringing him back to the present. He refocused his eyes on her and she added, "You can trust me, remember?"

Could he? He wanted to. She'd given him no reason not to, and after all, he had asked her to get Steve here in the first place. She wasn't trying to force him into anything. She never had, even in moments where he'd expected her to.

"Come talk to him," she said, gesturing towards the door. "You don't have to do anything you don't want to - don't forget this. Anything you or don't do is your choice now."

He nodded, her words easing his fraying nerves enough to make him look at the door and force himself to take a breath.

He could do this. He would do this. It was his choice, just as she had said.

"Okay."

She smiled. "Okay."

She opened the door, and she held on to his metal hand as she walked through it, tugging him along behind her. He thought it was odd at first, but when he realized that they had almost walked the length of the hall, he suddenly had bigger things on his mind.

When they stepped out of the hallway and into the kitchen, his gaze instantly fell on the two men sitting on the couch in the living room, talking amongst themselves. He recognized one man as the one he had ripped a metal wing off of and then kicked off the helicarrier over a month ago, and the other was perfectly recognizable even by the back of his head. The first man tapped the other's shoulder, instantly falling silent, and then Steve turned his head.

Summer's hand quietly left his as his past looked him in the eyes and then jumped to his feet, almost fast enough to trigger Bucky's defensive instincts. Familiarity flooded his mind as a rush of emotions flooded Steve's face - first surprise, then relief, then perhaps a twinge of happiness followed quickly by caution and care when he saw how just standing up almost made Bucky flinch.

They seemed so clear now, the flashes of memories that this man's face starred in - the fall, the bridge, the indistinct ones that he couldn't be completely sure of but saw all the same. All of it was real and standing there, trying obviously hard to not look hopeful but failing, audibly breathing in before saying, "Bucky?"

He didn't move, didn't say anything, didn't even blink. He didn't know what to do or say.

Slowly, Steve started walking closer, towards where he stood in the kitchen, and Summer gave his arm a light squeeze before heading back down the hallway, towards her son's room. Steve's friend stayed in the living room, watching quietly but staying away.

"How... how are you?" Steve asked, coming to a standstill six feet away or so, hands in his pockets.

If that wasn't a loaded question, he didn't know what was. He blinked, parting his lips slightly as words formed slowly in his head. "I remember you."

The smile that spread across Steve's face was short lived before he forced it into something less exuberant, but the sight of it had made something deep inside of Bucky hurt. "I knew you would." Then, after he paused, he asked, "Can I ask you something?"

Bucky's answer was a blink, still far too rooted to the spot to move enough to shrug. Steve nodded and then said, "After we fought, they found me washed up on the shore. I couldn't remember anything after hitting the water, but I remembered the way you looked when... what I'm asking is, did you pull me out of the water?"

Bucky nodded. Steve almost smiled again, but this time he managed to contain most of it.

"I knew it."

Bucky couldn't quite understand why that made Steve so happy, seeing as he was the one who put him in the water in the first place and had been one step away from killing him. He furrowed his brows, banishing the thought and focusing on a different one. "Can you help me remember... more?"

At that, Steve nodded and said quietly, "That's why I'm here, Bucky. I'm here to help you."

And no matter how hard he tried, he simply could not doubt the man any longer.

"Come sit down," Steve said, gesturing to Summer's kitchen table with his hand. "We've got a lot to talk about."

* * *

David's eyes were as big as saucers.

"Be calm when you see him, okay?" Summer said to her son after getting him dressed and ready to venture out of his room. "He's talking to Bucky, and we need to leave them alone until they're done. That's really important, okay?"

David nodded, then widened his brown eyes even more and started running around the room, picking up every piece of Captain America merchandise he owned before Summer gently stopped him with a laugh. "Just pick a few things, sweetie. If you grab everything you have you'll be dragging out your whole room."

She then sat down and watched her son positively bounce around the room with excitement, sighing and wondering what was going on out there. She could hear voices, so she knew that the two men were talking. Or, more accurately, Steve was talking and Bucky was listening.

When David had grabbed a few of his favorite toys and donned his favorite Captain America t-shirt, he then ran to the door, and she smiled at him as he looked back at her expectantly.

At the door, she looked down at him and said, "Remember what I said. Wait until they're done talking. Okay?"

He nodded, his smile plastered to his face. She chuckled and led him out into the hallway.

When they walked into the kitchen, neither man at her table paid them any attention. Steve was talking and Bucky was listening intently, staring at him with the same intense stare that she had come to know all too well. She directed David into the living room, where Sam was sitting, busying himself by skimming through a book from her coffee table.

"David, this is Sam," she said when Sam looked up and gave the boy a smile. "Sam, this is my son, David. He doesn't talk, so don't get offended if it seems like he's ignoring you."

"All right. Hey, buddy," Sam nodded. David gave him a once-over and then turned around to stare at Steve Rogers sitting in the next room. Sam chuckled, and Summer left briefly to fetch David a plate of food.

When she came back, she got David settled on the couch and then sat in an armchair, not exactly happy with the current awkward seating arrangement, so she pretended to be occupied on her phone while David ate and stared and Sam closed the book in his hands and dropped it back on the coffee table.

"Look," Sam said quietly, breaking the silence after awhile, "I'm sorry if we got off on the wrong foot. I just got a little concerned when I walked in here and saw -"

She gestured meaningfully towards David with an expression universally understood as _shut up,_ Sam glanced at the boy and then nodded, adding more discreetly, "I'll only ask one thing - did he..."

She watched him gesture with a serious expression, and she could tell that he was wordlessly asking if Bucky had victimized her during his stay. "Absolutely not. He's been through things none of us can imagine and I've helped him as much as I can. That's all there is to know. And he's never laid a hand on either of us. He's looked out for us."

She said this quietly, but with conviction and pure sobriety, and Sam only paused a moment before nodding. "All right. Fair enough."

* * *

"My mother... what did she look like?"

"Pretty similar to you, actually, except long, curly dark hair, but she usually wore it up," Steve replied. "Can you remember her?"

He replayed the flash that he sometimes saw when he watched Summer play with David, one of a woman holding his hand and smiling down at him with warm, kind eyes. "I think so. It's just a... just a picture in my head. I don't remember anything about her."

Steve nodded, then asked, "How about your sister?"

Bucky's eyebrows furrowed. "I have a sister?"

He nodded again. "Her name was Rebecca. She passed away in 1953. She was working as a nurse and contracted polio. She was married but hadn't had any kids yet."

He blinked, trying to absorb this information. It seemed like such a normal thing, to have a sister, a family, and yet the concept was foreign.

"She was younger than you. I remember the two of you fighting all the time, like a typical brother and sister, and I was always jealous because I was an only child. Didn't usually feel like one, though. I always had you."

Bucky looked up at him, and it was like looking into a vast lake that was frozen over - he knew there was more underneath it, so very much more than he could comprehend, but it was blocked by something impenetrable.

"My father?" he asked next.

"Colonel in the army," Steve answered. "He wasn't around much. When he was, you were glued to his side."

"Army," Bucky repeated, his effort to piece these things together evident on his face. He recalled what Summer had showed him online and what he'd seen at the Smithsonian. "I was a Sergeant."

"That's right. You weren't drafted - you enlisted. Said if you were going to give your life in the war, you wanted it to be your choice."

_Choice_. He had valued choice in his first life and had it utterly ripped away in the second. A pain shot through his head, but he ignored it.

"You have a choice again, Bucky," Steve said, meaningfully. "I read what they did to you. The Soviets, Zola, Pierce. It's beyond... anything. It's inhuman, worse than inhuman. And you have to know that none of it - none of it - is your fault. There's nobody else in the world who wouldn't have done all the same things that you have, if the same had happened to them."

He believed it so fiercely, without a trace of doubt. Bucky could see and hear Steve's conviction, and it was a pure, strong thing. Bucky wasn't sure he felt or thought anything with that much certainty.

"Can you tell me what you do remember?"

Bucky's frown deepened, and he looked down at the table as he fished through his clearest memories. "I remember falling. Waking up. My arm gone. They were drilling or something..."

Steve winced. "You were awake when they operated?"

He nodded. "I remember ice. Some of the missions. Some of the training. They always told me that I was changing the world. Saving the world." He looked up and asked after a pause, "They gave you something like they gave me. Right?"

"You mean the serum?" Steve asked, to which Bucky nodded. He took a deep breath. "Yeah. Sort of. During the war, your unit was captured in Italy. I broke all the prisoners out, and I found you strapped to a table in their lab. Zola had experimented on you with HYDRA's versions of the serum that I had. Whatever they gave you, it's the only explanation for how you could have survived falling from the train. But they gave you more later, the Soviets. They gave you about five different serums before one worked well enough for what they wanted. I have your Soviet file, that's how I know."

Unaware that his breathing was becoming slightly heavier, Bucky said, "I remember them talking... Russians... saying my cells regenerated too quickly and that's why they had to keep wiping my memory."

Steve nodded, sadness weighing down his eyes. "Yeah. That's why you're remembering things now. And you're going to keep remembering more. Nobody can take that away from you again."

"They're still out there."

"Not for long. And if you're afraid of them taking you back, Bucky, I won't let that happen. I promise you that."

Bucky looked up, again slightly bewildered by the conviction in Steve's eyes. Then Steve glanced down at his brown leather jacket and rummaged in his pockets for a moment before withdrawing his hand and placing it over the table, dropping a small little bundle of something in front of Bucky's hands. He peered at the item, feeling something inside start to swell when he realized what it was.

"I might have taken those from the Smithsonian," Steve admitted as Bucky stared at had once been his dog tags, back when he was a solider and not an assassin. "I'm not sure how they managed to get them in the first place. But... I thought it was better for you to have them back than for them to sit on display."

In disbelief, he touched the silver tags, turned them over and read his name again and again. But as he rolled the name in his mind, trying to make it feel right, something else occurred to him, and he looked up at Steve and asked with furrowed brows, "You stole something?" The idea of that just seemed completely wrong.

Steve grinned. "See? You remember me better than you think. And it's not really stealing. The way I see it, they borrowed those from you. I'm just returning them to their rightful owner."

Bucky kept staring at the things, unable to stop the small voice with which he spoke his next words. "Thank you."

"You're welcome," Steve replied, pausing. "I can help you, Bucky. I have friends who have been through the same sort of things you have. There's ways for you to get better. To remember who you really are. And I'll keep you safe while you do."

Bucky paused, feeling the familiar touch of guilt creep along his spine, and that poisonous voice that liked to tell him that he was the sum of his deeds and nothing more. He didn't deserve Steve's help, or his presence, or anything that he was being offered. Nothing would make him feel differently. He shook his head. "You don't... you don't need to do that. I can..."

"Get by on your own?" Steve guessed. When Bucky met his eyes again, he saw the man wearing a small, slightly ironic and warm smile. "I know. But you don't have to."

And there it was, the same memory he'd recalled only a snippet of on the helicarrier, this time the full thing. Steve after his mother's funeral, about half the size he was now, lost and grieving but determined not to be a burden on anyone else. And the words that Steve had just repeated to him, originally spoken from his own mouth, and for one moment, one short but potent moment, he could believe that he really had once been Bucky Barnes, not just the mangled and warped remains of what HYDRA had left of him.

He blinked back tears that had formed in his eyes, keeping them from falling when he felt Steve's hand pat the back of his own. "Will you come with me?"

Bucky thought for a moment, hesitant to leave the tentative comfort zone that he had with Summer in her home, but knowing full well that it could not possibly be permanent. He glanced towards the living room, where she sat, and said quietly, "HYDRA traced me here. They tried to kill her and her son. They'll do it again, and nobody will be there to protect them."

"Don't worry about that," Steve replied, a subtle warmth reaching his eye after hearing Bucky express concern for her. "I know a few people who can keep an eye out for her. She'll be safe."

"You're sure?"

"Of course," Steve said solemnly. "I'll never lie to you, Buck."

He nodded. He was out of reasons to argue. This course of action felt... right. "Okay."

Steve smiled, not bothering to try to temper it or hide it. "Okay."

Swift little footsteps running towards the table marked the end of the moment, prompting Steve to glance behind him and see one of his biggest fans standing just behind his chair and grinning adorably shyly, partially hiding behind a toy shield. His mother was not far behind.

"David, I told you to wait until they're done! I'm sorry," Summer sighed lightly, looking at both men apologetically, but Steve only smiled at the boy and turned towards him, while Bucky's eyes locked with hers.

"Nah, it's all right," Steve assured her while David's eyes grew huge before he darted behind his mother'a legs. "Shy one, huh?"

"Little bit," she replied, Bucky never taking his eyes from hers. She looked back and forth, clearly quite nervous. "Is everything going okay?"

"Yeah," Steve replied, smiling up at her. "Everything's great."

Bucky saw the question in her eyes, and it was clear to even him - she wanted to know if he was leaving. He gave her a slight nod, answering it and sparing her having to ask, and he pretended not to notice how for a split second, she allowed her face to fall.

While Steve and his undying good nature tried to coax David into coming out from behind her legs, Bucky watched as Summer smiled and laughed, urging her son to meet his hero, but looking at Bucky every few seconds, as if she couldn't help it.

He did not doubt his decision. He might never feel deserving of anyone's help, but there was no turning back now. This was the right choice for him. He couldn't deny, however, that he would miss the woman who had been been so instrumental in bringing him to where he currently was, which was a lot further than he thought he'd ever be.

* * *

She had known this was coming. She had expected it and encouraged it. Feeling sad about it was pointless and silly. But telling herself that wasn't helping much.

It didn't take long for David to come out of his shell with Steve, and Summer made sure to take a good amount of photos of them together and provide a sharpie for Steve to sign David's stuff. She was on autopilot, avoiding asking the question that she really wanted an answer to, which was when she could expect Bucky's departure.

Sam ended up asking the question for her, emerging from his respectful self-imposed exile to nod to the two men in question and ask, "I take it everything's cool?"

Summer noticed how Bucky avoiding looking at him, but Steve glanced up from signing David's shield to nod to him. "Yeah. Thanks, Sam."

"So we heading out soon, then?"

Steve then turned to Bucky, giving a slight shrug as he said, "We should leave soon. Sooner the better. I'll make a call about that concern of yours before we go."

Bucky nodded, and Summer tried not to look confused. But she was confused, and in light of the impending departures before her, she found herself reverting to what she had come to know best in the last five years: mom mode.

"All right, well... if David's okay out here, I'll just go get Bucky's things ready, then," she said, feeling the urge to stay busy and do something productive since she didn't know what else to do. Steve assured her that David was fine, and she avoided Bucky's eyes as she turned and left the room.

It was nothing if not practical. When Bucky had taken her backpack and tried to sneak off the other morning, we had packed barely enough to last him a day and clearly had no concept of what he actually needed to get by. So, she marched into her room, grabbed a duffel bag from the bowels of her closet, and started packing all the things she had bought for him in the last month.

She started in the bathroom, grabbing the things he'd never asked for her to get but that she got anyway, wondering how weird it would feel to go back to living life in mostly solitude without his stares to follow her throughout the day. A normal person would be relieved, not saddened. Once the bathroom was done, she moved back into her room and started tossing his clothes into the bag. She made sure to grab his notebook that was currently tossed to the floor, suspecting that with the memories written inside of it, it might be his most important possession.

She noticed a book on her bedside table, one that he'd been working on the last couple days. It was a nearly thousand-page volume documenting the horrors of Jewish persecution during World War II, and she made a mental note to suggest that he take a break from absorbing history every so often to read something pleasant and not so hard-hitting.

She was reaching to pick up the book and pack it too when she heard footsteps in the hall - his footsteps, which was an unprecedented thing to hear. She turned and saw Bucky in the doorway, watching her, and she quickly went back to what she was doing, though feeling distinctly more nervous now.

"Just grabbing your stuff for you," she explained as he walked inside the room. "Didn't want you to forget anything."

She finished up quickly, forgetting the book, and then zipped up the bag and turned to him, holding it out to him with a small smile. "Here you go. All the super stylish clothes I bought you."

He nodded, but he didn't take the bag from her. She placed at his feet instead, then tried not to fidget while she figured out how exactly to say goodbye to him.

She ended up keeping her mouth shut, fearing that if she opened it she would start immediately rambling and making an idiot of herself, but the silence was just as bad, because it left no buffer between them and only added to the unease of the moment.

Eventually, she had to say something, or else she was going to explode. "Be careful, okay?"

Trying not to cringe at herself for telling someone rather nearly indestructible to be careful, she covered up her embarrassment by leaning forward and laying a chaste, light kiss at the corner of his mouth. She had initially aimed for his cheek, but his mouth was like a magnet for hers, and the corner of it was the best that she could manage.

She pulled away, ignoring her pointlessly thudding heart and fluttery stomach, willing them nearly into submission and then almost gasping when his hand shot behind her head and pulled her right back. His lips covered hers, both of his hands tangling in her hair, quickly ruining her ponytail and holding her in place while he branded her with a kiss that she both hated and loved, because she knew it was the last.

It didn't last long, but it was long enough to leave her breathing heavily and a little dazed. She opened her eyes as he drew back, his forehead lightly touching hers, looking down at her lips and then up to her eyes as he said quietly, almost in a whisper, "Thank you."

She nodded, again keeping her mouth shut for fear of what might fly out. She felt bereft when his hands left her hair and the heat of his body retreated with him, as he drew away.

She'd miss his hands in her hair. She'd miss a lot of things.

Then an idea occurred to her, and she spoke it before she could think better of it. "Can I see your knife?" He looked at her with confusion, maybe alarm too, and she shrugged. "Just for a minute."

After a moment's hesitation, he produced the thing out of thin air, and she was pretty sure she'd never held such a sharp blade before. She took it carefully, watching his bewilderment grow as she took her hair down out and then finger-combed through it briefly before plucking out a small chunk of one of the back layers and then putting his knife to it, easily cutting away a lock.

She handed the knife back to him, then shrugged at the piece of hair in her other hand. "I'm pretty sure that this is a super old fashioned thing to do, but... you're like a hundred years old, so I guess it's fitting."

He stared at her as she then looked around, looking for something to put it in, eventually settling on the book she had forgotten to pack for him. She opened it and placed the lock of hair between the pages, then closed it and handed it to him. "You know. Something to remember me by. Oh, and you should read some fiction when you finish this. Read Harry Potter or something, before you read so much war and death that you stop reading altogether."

He took the book in his hands, looking at it and then her a little helplessly, and she exhaled before reaching out again, this time to embrace him one last time.

She could feel him breathing her in as her arms wrapped around him, his nose gently to her hair, and she would not have pulled away for a long time if she hadn't come to her senses after a long moment.

"Okay," she sighed, drawing back and looking down at their feet, picking up the duffel bag and placing it into his hands. "Let's go."

She'd have plenty of time to miss him later. For now, she would focus on seeing him off.

He followed behind her, as usual, as she walked back out into the kitchen, a smile creeping up on her face when she saw that Steve had broken out his legendary shield and was helping David to hold it. Her son would be happy for the rest of his life now, undoubtedly.

The next few minutes went by in a blur of men talking, David smiling, Bucky standing awkwardly and her feeling like a spectator to her own life. She snapped out of it eventually, after Sam took Bucky's bag from him to load it in the car outside - she didn't miss the cool looks with which the two mean regarded one other - and then David fell out of his fanboy high long enough to notice as well, peeking at the bag, then Bucky, and then Summer.

"Oh... um, Bucky has to leave now, David," she explained to the boy gently. "He's gonna go stay with his friend."

Guilt prickled at her, because she hadn't thought once of how David might react to Bucky's leaving. But, as it was, David's expression became sad, and Bucky became visibly uncomfortable. Steve seemed to simply be talking it all in, looking from one person to the other and then back again, staying silent.

Then Summer held her breath, because David left his hero's side to walk up to Bucky, and stood there the way that he did when he was about to give a slightly rare hug. She bit her lip, and Bucky looked to her questioningly - and maybe a little panicked - and she gestured to him to bend down and let David hug him.

He hesitated, but after a moment, Bucky did as she said. His movements were awkward and he was as still as a statue when David threw his arms around him, but Summer couldn't stop the smile that crossed her lips. She glanced up at Steve, who in turn glanced at her, and she could see behind his own surprised smile how much he wanted to know exactly what was going on here that he wasn't aware of. She'd tell him, but she didn't have much of a clue herself.

Then the moment was over, and David let go of Bucky before heading towards his mother. She patted his head and smiled at Bucky as he straightened. He looked a little lost and maybe shaken, but not in a bad way. She could imagine how the day had been utterly overwhelming for him.

"Ready?" Steve asked, looking at Bucky, and he nodded. Steve then picked up his shield, and gestured for Bucky to head for the door.

He kept his eyes down as he walked, but after the door opened and he stepped outside, Steve muttered something to him and then turned back around. Before she knew it, Summer was being approached by an emotional and grateful Steve Rogers.

"I can't thank you enough for what you've done," he said, hands in his pockets as they stood in the kitchen.

She shrugged slightly, unsure of what to say. "You're welcome. I'm glad he's going with you. I know that's what he needs."

He nodded, then asked, "Can I see your phone?" She fumbled a moment before producing the thing from her pocket and handing it to him. He typed some numbers in and then explained, "This is my number. I'm giving it to you because I have a feeling this isn't the last you'll see of us."

She blinked as she took her phone back. "Really?"

"He wouldn't leave unless I promised to make sure that you'd be protected without him, in case HYDRA came back here. Whatever's happened in the last month, he cares about you. And he needs all the friends he can get."

Mentally, she screamed at herself not to let it show how unexpected that was, that Bucky had thought of her and her safety like that. Unfortunately, she knew that Steve was reading her like an open book, and she was almost past the point of caring.

"Buy him lots of coffee," she blurted out. "He likes the expensive stuff."

Steve smiled. "Always has." Then he reached out his hand, and she shook it for the second time that day. "I'll be in touch."

She nodded, and then Steve told David goodbye before heading out the door. She walked to the doorway herself and watched as Bucky opened one of the backseat doors the black car they'd arrived in, and their eyes met one more time. She smiled and gave him a light wave of her hand. He didn't wave or smile back, but burned a hole into her soul with his eyes before climbing in the car. She pretended that she wasn't suddenly trembling a little bit.

Steve called out his thanks again before getting into the front passenger seat. She nodded to him and watched as the car's engine started, unable to see any of the occupants through the darkened windows, holding David at her side as the car started to back up.

Meanwhile, iniside the car, Sam paused before pulling out the driveway, looking up at his rearview mirror and asking the man in his backseat, "So, you don't plan on ripping out my steering wheel again, right?"

Met by an icy glare from Bucky, Sam glanced at Steve and raised an eyebrow at the similarly displeased look he found on the Captain's face. "Okay. Too soon. My bad."

As Sam then switched gears and headed down the gravel road that led through the woods, Bucky watched the trees pass outside the window, eventually glancing up and catching a glimpse of his old best friend's eyes as he cautiously looked back at Bucky. He could only hope that the stubborn hope and faith that he saw in those eyes weren't for nothing, and that he wouldn't eventually shatter them just like he had shattered everything else he could remember.

On the way out of Virginia, he dozed off. He dreamed not of trains, not of falling, and not of nightmarish torture chairs, but instead of soft dark hair that smelled like flowers, blue eyes like the sky after a storm, and lips that he didn't expect to ever kiss again.

* * *

She didn't step a single foot into her bedroom until after midnight, when the day was gone and she'd lost all reasons to avoid facing it.

The house was quiet, the only other occupant besides herself long asleep after the most exciting day of his young life. Her room sat in within the building like a silent, taunting presence, beckoning her and repelling her all at the same time. She couldn't avoid it forever, however, and when she almost fell asleep at the kitchen table, she gave in and decided that she'd run out of time to keep pretending that she wouldn't eventually have to venture inside of that room.

When she stepped inside of it for the first time since telling Bucky goodbye earlier that day, she flipped on the light and looked around, though her attention was immediately captured by the bed.

She walked to it, knowing that this was the part she had been nervous about, then sat down slowly on the side of the mattress. The sheets were a mess, and always had been since Bucky had taken over this room. She had washed the sheets often and periodically even made the bed for him, when she was feeling bored or otherwise generous, but by the next day, it would all be wrecked, sometimes torn up, and always twisted and mangled.

She reached out to draw away the blanket that was on top of the bed, revealing ripped up beige-colored sheets beneath that she would need to replace. They were torn the way they always were, down five distinct lines, like a hand had grasped and ripped fingers down the cheap material like it was made of nothing. Her own fingers disappeared within the rips, dwarfed and insignificant.

Then her eyes travelled upwards, to her pillows, and her breath caught in her throat. On her most comfortable pillow, the one that he'd taken a liking to himself, were distinct stains of tears that told the story of all those nights she had listened to him screaming and groaning in his sleep.

She closed her eyes, then let herself fall into the bed, on her back, and lay still. She was surrounded by the ghost of him, of his scent and his pain and the things that haunted him, and she had never fully understood the meaning of the word bittersweet until then.

In the morning, she would wake to find herself shocked at sleeping more soundly than she had in a month, dreamlessly, wrapped up in a cocoon of those ruined sheets and the tangible presence that he had left behind within them. She would also wake up alone, but that was what she knew and what she expected.

Regardless of what had once been, it was all back to normal. Whatever that possibly could be now.

**A/N: Sooooo just the epilogue left now! Thank you guys all so much for reading and following this story! In this chapter I took a few liberties with what little we know of what that Russian file might hold. I went with the multiple serum thing because it seems likely that he was a lab rat more than once, both pre and post fall, and to me it would make sense that it took a couple attempts to get him all... super-soldier-y. But I could be wrong about that. Also, after pausing the movie on Bucky's display at the Smithsonian to read it (me? Obsessive? Pshhhhh), I noticed that it said he was the oldest of four kids, and obviously, I've totally ignored that in favor of sticking to the comic canon where he's only got Rebecca for a sibling. Mostly because I only saw the oldest of four thing after the fact and I decided that I'm fine with the comic angle on that one. And I figured nobody would really care. So anyway.**

**My thanks and love to midnightwings96 for helping me every step of the way with this story as well as helping me out GREATLY with the sequel, which is coming along nicely. Frankly I think the sequel is a million times better than this story, so I'm excited to start posting it here once this story is officially wrapped up. Thank you guys again, and I love you all! See you at the epilogue :D**


	12. Epilogue

Following what she was sure she would always think of as the single most interesting month of all her years, life went on. Everything went from unpredictable and exciting, not always in positive ways, back to very predicable and normal. All that remained of her previous experience was in the form of a tiny little building that popped up out of nowhere on the edge of her property, which housed a number of alternating agents who took turns keeping surveillance for her safety. Unnerving as that was, it did help her sleep at night.

She started home kindergarten lessons with David, drove him to and from doctor appointments, turned in college assignments on time, sold a few articles to a couple of random online magazines, and all in all, went along as if nothing out of the ordinary had ever happened to her. But falling back into a reliable routine didn't stop the nightmares that she couldn't quite outrun, and it didn't stop David from having his own bad dreams and crawling into bed with her a few times a week to get away from them.

Her dreams weren't always so bad, though. Sometimes they were too pleasant for their own good, and they would leave her spending far too much of the following day staring at her phone and trying to work up the nerve to just do it and send a text. Sometimes she would type it out; sometimes it would be long, sometimes it would be just a few words, but she would always end up clearing the screen and sending nothing.

She did that for three months. By the end of the third month, she decided to let it go and accept the fact that she would probably never hear from Steve Rogers, let alone Bucky, and that she'd been silly to ever hope otherwise. She just wanted to know how he was doing, but since they weren't talking to her and she couldn't pluck up the courage to talk to them, she would simply remain in the dark.

Her brother invited her to a week in California when she got some time off from school and flew her out on his dime. She hadn't been there longer than a day before he decided that she was hiding something big from him and decided to try to pry the truth out of the way he had been since she had turned 21, which was to shove a glass of wine at her and keep refilling it until she was spilling every secret she had. She knew what he was doing, though, and she kept her mouth shut tight and shoved his stupid wine bottle away after her second glass.

"Come on," Paul whined, sitting across his table from his sister while his pregnant wife Sarah rolled her eyes and Summer sipped the wine stonily. "If you don't tell me what it is, I'm gonna have to pull out the big guns."

"You don't have any big guns," she pointed out, glancing at David as he played on the floor with his sole male cousin out of six. "And I have no secrets." _None at all._

"You always have secrets. Even if they're really boring ones. So what's his name?"

She raised an eyebrow and took another drink.

"What's so bad about him that you can't tell me? Is he an ax murderer?"

_No, I'm fairly sure he preferred knives and large automatic weapons_. She kept drinking, hoping he'd give up eventually.

"Is he... a _she_?" he asked with a mock scandalous tone.

She snorted. "Now you're really reaching."

"I don't think she's got any deep dark secrets this time," Sarah shrugged, scrolling bored through her phone.

Paul rolled his eyes and made a noise of frustration. "Yeah right. I'll figure out what it is. Even if I have to break into my stores of Veritaserum." He spoke the last word slowly, dragging out each syllable in the worst Alan Rickman impression Summer had ever heard, and she laughed ungracefully into her glass.

While she wiped her mouth and ignored how Paul laughed at her, her phone vibrating in her back pocket made her automatically reach back and retrieve it. She was in the midst of taking another drink when she glanced at the screen, which was when she choked, spit, and then coughed as her stomach dropped and her heart stopped for a minute.

It was a message from a number that she may or may not have memorized within a day of receiving, and it consisted of just one sentence: _Hey, are you busy?_

"What? Is that him? Is it?"

She looked up, feeling suddenly dizzy, and when she saw the grin on her brother's face, she knew what was going to happen next. She would lie, badly. He wouldn't believe her, and he would chase her like they were both kids again until he had her phone in his hands. And then he might send some extremely embarrassing texts in her name. Which would be particularly horrible in this case.

She also suddenly remembered that she had a picture of Bucky on her phone that she had never deleted.

"Nope," she replied evenly. "Just an email about a really great sale at Victoria's Secret. Like they're basically giving stuff away."

Paul nodded, still grinning. "Really?"

"Yup."

Then there was silence, and they stared at one another. Summer gripped the phone tight in her hand, then suddenly jumped up from the table and made a mad dash out of the room. He followed immediately, and Sarah sat back in her chair and sighed.

Summer managed to throw herself into the bathroom and slam the door shut just before Paul would have caught up with her, and as he cursed at her from the other side, she laughed triumphantly at him and then pulled the text back up on her phone.

"You can't stay in there forever! And you'd better not delete the smoking guns from your phone before you come out!"

"Go get drunk and punch someone, Ginger!" she shot back, leaning over the sink and trying to formulate a reply to Captain America. After way too long, she finally sent back, _Nope, what's up?_

Hoping that a a reply wouldn't take long, because she really couldn't hide forever in there, she turned around and leaned against the sink, tapping her door nervously and letting her mind run at about 100 miles per hour. To her relief, her phone buzzed again rather quickly.

_I completely understand if your answer is no, but I was wondering if you'd be up for a week in New York City._

Her eyes widened, and she started tapping the screen furiously, deleting and restarting a few times due to her automatically falling into "textspeak" and not the proper grammar that a conversation with Steve Rogers seemed to warrant. _Absolutely! Why? Is everything okay? Is he okay?_

Then it was back to tapping her foot, both of them this time, and biting her lip as she waited. She dropped her phone and had to catch it in midair when it went off again. _He's doing better. Slowly but surely. Just thought a visit from you might do him some good._

Maybe it was the wine, or the hiding, or the thrill of finally hearing from this man for the first time in over three months, but she suddenly felt a rush of warmth and smiled despite her best efforts to stay neutral and calm. Before she could even begin to type a reply, she got another text. _Can you make it next week? _She blinked, calculating the time in her head before she remembered that a week in New York was nowhere remotely in her budget. Then, one more text came. _Trip's on me, by the way._

She breathed a sigh of relief. _I can definitely make it. Thank you. And I'm happy to hear from you._

It was easy to start having delusions of grandeur when one was texted by a superhero who personally offered to fly them out for a week to their current city of residence, but she managed to keep a lid on her excitement while she waited for his last text.

_You're welcome. And thank you._

She couldn't wipe the grin off of her face as she deleted all of the texts, and the old picture in her files as an added precaution. She then put the phone back into her pocket, turned towards the mirror, took a deep breath, and forced her expression into something bored and neutral. Then she smiled and had to start over again.

When she finally gave up and decided that her face was going to look stupid nonstop for the next week regardless of what she did, she sighed and finally opened the door. Paul was waiting on the other side, brandishing a tiny vial of clear liquid and wearing a hilariously falsely serious expression. She narrowed her eyes and asked, "What is that supposed to be?"

"An authentic vial of Veritaserum that cost me more than I will ever admit to my wife," he replied. "It might be just water in there. It might be a real truth serum. Shall we find out?"

She raised one unimpressed eyebrow. "You are such a nerd, it makes me want to cry."

"And you are hiding something. Like a true Slytherin."

"You are a doctor, Paul. A _doctor_."

He rolled his eyes and let out a breath. They stood there for a moment, and Summer knew that she couldn't hide anything from him, not really. She never could before, and she didn't think that would ever change.

"... But you're not wrong," she said eventually.

He quickly snapped his eyes up and grinned. "I knew it."

"The thing is, I can't tell you anything about it," she said quietly. "And you need to trust me that I can't, and that it's something you just need to wait and trust me on."

"What? Why?"

"Because," she shrugged. "One day, I promise, I'll be able to explain everything. But not yet. Okay?"

His brows furrowed. "Are you in trouble?"

She smiled, chuckling breathlessly. "Probably. But not the kind you need to worry about."

Paul studied her for a moment or two, long and hard, and then asked, "Ax murderer?"

She rolled her eyes and then pulled her brother into a hug. He wouldn't believe her even if she told him the truth. "Nerd."

He sighed in frustration and hugged her back. "Brat. I'm getting all the gray hairs you'd be giving Mom and Dad if they were still here."

She could only smile, much more excited for her upcoming trip than she should have been.

* * *

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Steve tried to discreetly pocket his phone as he sat on the park bench, looking up when heavy tracks came to an end in front of him. He smiled and quickly got to his feet, a little too nonchalantly, and only smiled more when his friend shot him a sideways glance. "Ready for another lap?"

Bucky, who now looked more like the Bucky that Steve knew with the haircut that Steve had talked him into, adjusted the holographic cover on his left hand and muttered, "Next time you have a call to make that I'm not supposed to hear, just say so."

Steve only grinned and pointed out a girl walking her dog up ahead. "Let's walk for now," he said, forgoing their ridiculously overly fast running until the girl moved on and the park was empty again. They had to come to the park to run when it was most empty, which was sometimes at night and sometimes three in the morning. If it was only Steve, he wouldn't worry about who saw him, but he didn't want witnesses to start whispering about who the second super soldier was. "And I wasn't calling, I was texting. It's like writing a letter on a phone. And I planned on telling you exactly who I was talking to."

Bucky didn't say anything, instead looking at him expectantly and a little annoyed at having to walk like an old lady. Or having texting explained to him. It was hard to tell.

"I asked your friend Summer if she wanted to come and pay a visit," Steve said, watching Bucky's eyes suddenly widen fractionally as he stopped walking altogether. "She said yes."

Bucky opened his mouth, then closed it, and finally narrowed his eyes. "Why?"

"Why did she say yes or why did I ask her?" Steve asked, smile fading a bit when he saw the slight panic on his friend's face.

Bucky didn't answer, instead staring down towards the ground and getting a far-away look in his eyes that Steve was used to by now. He was used to a lot of things, like hearing a man that had grown up in Brooklyn with him curse in perfect Russian when he got pissed off, or punching him in the face when he was stupid enough to try to wake him up from a nightmare. This one was a little bit different, though.

He put a hand on Bucky's shoulder and nudged him out of his own head. "Hey. Is it all right that I did that? I thought you wouldn't mind seeing her."

Bucky shook his head slightly, blinking and then looking up at Steve, looking a bit confused. "She wants to come?"

Steve nodded, "Yeah. She asked about you, too." After a pause, he asked, "Should I not have asked her?"

Bucky shook his head. "It's okay."

Steve nodded, and then they resumed walking. After a moment or two of silence, Steve said, "She'll be here next week."

Bucky nearly stopped walking again, but he kept on this time, though he got the same troubled look on his face as before. Steve frowned at that, trying to figure out what was bothering him so much, but then it occurred to him that maybe he was overthinking it. Maybe what was bothering Bucky wasn't some terrible, underlying thing like it normally was, but something much more simpler and... human.

"Bucky... are you nervous?"

Bucky's head shot up. "What?"

Steve tried not to smile. "You're nervous, aren't you?"

"Shut up," Bucky muttered, which only made Steve smile more. During the first month of living with him, when Steve would get on his nerves, Bucky would ignore him and leave the room. During the second month, he would glare at Steve and then leave the room. Then, starting in the third month, he would tell Steve to shut up and stay where he was. Progress, however small, was a welcome thing.

"You know," Steve said, "there was a time when I would have killed to see you actually nervous over a girl. Even when we were kids you were a cocky jerk." Bucky said nothing to this, so Steve went on. "Not that you should be looking for a relationship right now, necessarily. That's not why I invited her. Although, Sam did notice a few things when we picked you up that I've been meaning to ask you about."

Bucky turned and gave Steve a look that left no room for doubt as to how little he wanted to discuss the subject. At this point, Steve knew to drop the issue. There were only specific times when it was a good idea to push Bucky, like when Steve had to convince him to see the psychologist recommended by both Clint Barton and Natasha. Unless it was something completely necessary, he had learned to let Bucky grow at his own pace and simply be his friend. And that involved shutting up when Bucky gave him that particular look.

Still, he had to get one more comment in. "She's pretty."

Bucky glared at him, then glanced around the now-empty park before breaking out into a run at full speed. Steve chuckled, sprinting after him and hoping that he'd made the right the call. He was pretty sure that he had.

Neither man could outrun the other, which was something they had figured out the first day that Steve had convinced Bucky that exercise would help him feel more physically balanced. In fact, as far as Steve could tell, there were not many differences between their physical abilities, aside from the very different ways in which they had each acquired them. He would have been grateful to have a friend who could relate to the experience of being a super soldier, but there was nothing about Bucky's past ordeal that Steve was grateful for. Aside from the fact that he was alive.

Four laps later, they had to slow down for the sake of another park guest, this time a couple who was taking their sweet time walking through. Steve wasn't expecting Bucky to break the silence after their run had slowed to a walk.

"I remembered something today," Bucky said quietly, eyes on the pathway before them. "It's blurry, but I'm pretty sure I remember us as kids and you getting beat up on a playground."

"That happened a lot," Steve replied, with a slight grimace.

Bucky glanced at him and then said, "It was a girl beating you up."

Steve chuckled. "Oh. That would be the day we met, then. First day of kindergarten. I accidentally spilled a drink on the girl during lunch, so then at recess, she decided to push me off a swing and punch me. She hit really hard for a girl. You pulled her off me said she was lucky that your dad taught you to never hit a girl."

His brow furrowed a bit, and Bucky asked, "That's how we met?"

"Yep. You introduced yourself as you dragged me to the nurses office. That was also the day I found out I had asthma. So from then on I was the short, skinny asthmatic loser who got beat up by a girl on his first day at school."

"... Sounds familiar," Bucky muttered.

"You put a frog down the girl's shirt the next day. She cried for an hour."

He frowned. "I don't remember that."

"You will eventually," Steve assured him, fully believing that he would.

"I might not," Bucky replied, a tightness to his jaw as he said this. Steve knew why.

"Look, I know what Dr. Connor said..."

"It makes sense," Bucky shrugged. "I remember everything... after... so much easier. And clearer."

According to Bucky's old Soviet file that Natasha had given Steve, when the Russians had recovered him from the snow, nearly-dead and broken, his brain had suffered trauma equal to that of his body. The fact that any function remained at all was a testament to Zola's experiments on him while in HYDRA captivity, and the serums they pumped him with after regenerated his brain activity, but there remained a barrier between the pre- and post-fall memories that was exceedingly difficult to breach. Dr. Connor had privately told Steve that Bucky might never recover all of his old memories entirely.

"I still can't remember my sister at all. My mother I do, barely. Not really my father. Everything I can remember is mostly all things with you."

Steve sighed, wishing he knew what to say. He could tell how desperate Bucky was to remember his old life, the good one, and Steve wished he could just remember for the both of them. "You just have to give it time, Bucky. It'll come back."

"I don't know why you're so sure of that."

Steve shrugged. "Well, I've been right so far. Nobody else thought you'd remember me when we fought. But I knew you would. I had faith."

There was silence for a few moments, and then Bucky remarked, "That kind of makes you an idiot."

Steve laughed. His smile grew when he looked at Bucky and found an almost-smile on his face, uneasy and wholly unconfident but there. He may have been a shadow of who he once was, but a shadow could not exist on its own - something had to cast it. He was still in there somewhere, and Steve took these fleeting moments as all the encouragement he needed to keep going.

"Yeah, well," Steve said after he stopped laughing and the almost-smile had mostly faded from Bucky's face, "some things never change."

* * *

Traveling with David was never easy, and back-to-back trips would have been a nightmare if she hadn't assured him that he'd get to see Captain America again. It was still difficult, but whenever being out of his comfort zone would start to get to him - which was a lot - she would remind him of what the reward for persevering was, and all in all, he had been a trooper. Summer, on the other hand, was a nervous wreck.

On her last day in California, she did something that she hadn't done in a long time, which was buy herself new, actually decent, clothing. It suddenly seemed like something incredibly crucial to do, so she and her sister in law took care of it, and Sarah was nice enough to not question why a woman whom she had never seen wear a dress in her life suddenly spend an hour trying different ones on and ultimately buying three.

Which brought Summer to where she currently was, which was the backseat of a cab in New York City. Her phone was in her hand and she was staring out the window, watching the tall buildings pass by and trying to quell the nerves that were simmering beneath the surface. Her dresses were in her suitcase in the trunk, mocking her silently. Almost as soon as she had bought them, she had felt like an idiot - she was coming here on a friendly visit to a man that she had helped in his time of need, nothing else. It wasn't like he was going to ask her on a date.

But that hadn't stopped her from dressing better today than she had during his entire stay at her house, in high heeled black knee high boots, dark jeans, and a long blue sweater that was belted at the waist and did a great job hugging the curves she normally kept concealed under t-shirts. She also might have spent fifteen minutes trying to fix her hair in an airport bathroom after landing in NYC, but she ended up leaving it loose and down in the end, before spending another ten minutes doing something she almost never did, which was put on makeup. David had stared at her the whole time as if she she were an alien inhabiting his mother's body.

Her phone buzzed and made her jump. She quickly read the incoming text and felt herself becoming even more jittery. _We'll be a few minutes behind you. Wait on the bench across from my building and we'll be there in five minutes tops._

When the cab came to a halt only moments later, in front of said apartment building, she paid the driver and then hauled herself and her son out, grabbed her suitcase and glanced across the street to locate the bench. From there, they made the short walk, and as they sat down, Summer started scanning the faces of pedestrians as they walked back and forth, waiting to see one that she knew. David was anxious too, so she put an arm around him and told herself to stop staring at every single passerby

Three moments passed wherein she kept looking despite her own protests, and at last, a blonde head popped up a little ways down on the other side of the street. The profile was unmistakable, and he was so tall that not noticing him was impossible. He was talking to someone at his left, and he was blocking her view of this person, but then he paused in his walking briefly, and she thought her eyes were utterly lying to her.

That couldn't be Bucky, could it?

She watched in a stupor, jaw figuratively on the ground and eyes wide and unblinking as the two men walked down the sidewalk. She couldn't even start analyzing the clothes that Bucky was wearing, because she was stuck on the shorter hair that she was now dying to get a close up look at, and it all simply wasn't computing.

That was actually _him_.

Steve saw her first, just as they reached the apartment building, and he smiled and waved. She did the same, and David tried to hide behind her shoulder. Bucky seemed rather interested by the ground under his feet. Steve gestured for her to cross the street, and after a bit of convincing, she got David to his feet and grabbed her suitcase from the ground.

The walk across the street was quick, and every time she glanced up, Bucky was making sure that he was looking away. She saw Steve bump his shoulder and say something with a grin, to which Bucky replied with a glare, and she really hoped that he wasn't unhappy with her visit.

Before she could stress about it, she had reached the sidewalk, and Steve, ever the gentleman, immediately took the handle of her suitcase from her hand and gave her his friendliest smile. "Hi! Glad you made it safely."

"Thanks," she smiled back, glancing behind her as David hid himself just as he had the first time he met Steve.

"I got your hotel booked, it's right around the corner from here and it's pretty nice, from what I could tell," Steve said, while Bucky wandered off towards the wall of the building for no particular reason.

"Okay, great. I really can't thank you enough," she replied, eyes darting to the back of Bucky's head before falling back to Steve.

"It's no problem," Steve shrugged before gesturing to Bucky and mouthing the word _nervous_ to her.

For a moment, she thought she must have read his lips wrong. She blinked, trying to wrap her head around the concept of Bucky being nervous to see her, and then Steve merely smiled and peered behind her at David's hiding form.

"Hey buddy," he said softly. "You can't come hold my shield again if you keep hiding like that."

David suddenly sprung out from behind her, wearing a face-splitting smile and basically bouncing towards him instead of walking. Steve grinned and then glanced at Summer cautiously. "Can I take him up to have a look at it?"

"Sure," she nodded without hesitation. Who wouldn't implicitly trust Captain America with their child?

"All right, come on," Steve said to David, who smiled back at Summer excitedly before bounding into the building after his hero. On the way, Steve not so subtly nudged Bucky's shoulder, giving him an even less subtle smile.

After chuckling at her son's enthusiasm, Summer realized that Steve had clearly had an agenda in getting David and himself upstairs. She was now alone on the sidewalk with Bucky, who had turned to the side and no longer had his back to her, but was still pretending to stare at something off in the distance. She straightened out the bottom of her sweater, trying to figure out what to say to him as she took a few cautious steps closer.

"So... hi," she finally said, cringing even as the words left her lips. As she rolled her eyes at herself, however, he turned around to face her, at last, and her heart leapt up into her throat.

The hair was so much better up close than she could have dreamed. It was similar to way it looked in his old photos from his WWII days, but a little more modern in its styling, which Steve undoubtedly had a hand in. With it combed away from his face and no longer dangling on his shoulders, she felt like she was really looking at his face for the first time. And his eyes were going to be the death of her.

That was also the moment when she finally allowed herself to look at the rest of him. He was dressed infinitely better than she had ever dressed him, in dark jeans that fit him too well, the same black combat-style boots he'd always worn, and a black leather jacket over a gray button down shirt. But it wasn't just the clothes themselves that made her stomach do a series of rather impressive gymnastics. It was all in the way that he wore them. And also in the way that he watched her ogle him.

"Hi."

His one spoken word snapped her out of it, slightly. She looked up into his eyes and quickly looked away, then back again, mentally telling herself to get it together before she melted into a pile of Jello. But, before she could succumb into a lifeless fruit-flavored gelatinous goo, she saw his eyes leave her face and look her over much as she had him. She felt her face redden and she was suddenly very glad that she was wearing actual decent lady clothes.

His eyes lingered at her feet. The boots had been a last-minute buy, about three inches higher in the heel than anything else she owned, but Sarah had claimed that they "dripped sex", so she got them.

When he finally looked back up to her face, she was sure that an eternity had passed since she first said hi, but in reality, it all happened in less than ten seconds.

"You look different," he said.

"So do you," she replied. "In a good way. Really good way." Cue cringing.

He gave her a look, and it was as vague as most of the other ones she could remember of his. Vowing to get it together, she asked, "So, how are you?"

He shrugged, and the movement of his shoulders under the leather made her bite her lip. "Steve says I'm doing better."

"Remembering more?"

He nodded. "He took me to Brooklyn last month. That helped."

"Good," she smiled. Beyond the hair and the obvious changes, he looked much more alive than he had before. His blue eyes weren't as dead-looking now, though she could still see the shadows behind them. Those might never leave. His skin was brighter too, like he'd spent more time in the sun, and he simply looked much healthier. It all came together in a way that was overwhelming to a woman who had still found his long-haired, scruffy, half-dead look still rather attractive.

But this was on a whole other level entirely, and her racing heart did not appreciate it.

"Why are you here?" he asked in his typical blunt, unintentional way.

"I missed you," she admitted, watching his eyes soften as she spoke. "I worried about you, too. I thought about calling, like a million times, but I always thought... I don't know."

"Thought what?"

She shrugged. "That I'd be intruding or something. Or you wouldn't want to hear from me."

"Why wouldn't I?"

She felt like they were back on her couch again, and he was staring at her like she was insane for questioning why he'd want to kiss her. He was looking at her the same way now, and she felt like an idiot, and also suddenly rather hot despite the cool temperatures outside.

"I... don't know," she said, watching as his eyes again fell from hers to other places. Her lips were first, and he stared a line down her figure that ended, again, at her boots, where his gaze lingered once more. Maybe Sarah had been right about the things.

And she was glad Bucky hadn't learned any degree of subtlety in the last three months. It just worked better that way.

His hands, previously in his jean pockets, had slipped out a bit, and she noticed something extremely off about his left hand. It looked like a real flesh and blood hand. "Did... something happen to your hand?"

He looked up at her, confusion on his face, then glanced down at his hands before withdrawing them both. "No. No, it's a hologram... cover... thing. Steve's girlfriend gave it to me. Makes it look normal when I'm around people."

"Oh," she replied, frowning a little. She had gotten so used to his metal hand and arm that looking at the way it was at the moment was oddly unnerving. "That's cool. But I like it better the other way."

He looked at her like she was crazy again. Maybe she was. She smiled at him, biting back the urge to find out what his hair felt like between her fingers compared to how it used to. It looked absolutely perfect. She was a little stuck on it.

"You're here for a week."

She nodded, unsure if it was a question or a statement. "Yep."

"What are you going to do while you're here?"

She shrugged, forcing herself to think about his question instead of the curve of his lips or how much more powerful his jawline looked without hair hiding it. "I don't know. Show David the sights. I've been here once before, so I've done the tourist stuff already." She hesitated, then added, "But I'm here to see you, you know."

He stared at her then, more softly than she would have expected, and the hint of confusion in his eye told her that he was trying to figure her out. Just like always, she had to fight to keep from squirming under his gaze, but it was worse now. A lot worse.

Then he looked around, drawing a breath through his mouth, and he looked down and furrowed his brows before muttering one sound. "Uh..."

She raised her eyebrows slightly, watching him struggle a bit. She also held her breath.

"While you're here," he began, making eye contact again after a moment of faltering, "if you wanted... would you... could I... maybe... take you out to dinner?"

She would forever be proud that she did not gasp, choke, or laugh awkwardly in response. She did, however, forget how to think and how to breathe for a few seconds. This was the one thing that she knew would not happen, and yet it just had happened, rather quickly into her stay.

Then she smiled, more widely than she could remember in years, and she almost went into shock all over again when the corners of his lips turned upwards, enough to just break the frown that had been permanently fixed on his face since the day she met him. It wasn't enough to be a smile, or even half a grin, but the way that she saw it, it was a promise of what might be to come. And she realized that she would do anything to see a real, genuine smile unfold across that face, though that tiny one was enough to make her heart skip and her own smile start to ache for how huge it was.

It was more than enough of an answer for him, and as the moment lingered between them, she was suddenly grateful for buying those dresses after all.

**A/N: aaaaaand that's the epilogue :) Thank you guys all so much for reading and following this story! I hope you'll keep an eye out for the sequel, which will be titled _Life After Death_ (and will be moving over into the M-rated section due to triggery stuff and a generally more adult theme), and which I will be posting soon. I've already made an ok amount of progress in that story but the chapters are all a lot longer than the ones in this story, so it takes longer to write and thus updates will take a bit longer. I'll try to stick to a once a week update, given my head start, but we'll see how it goes down the road. Again, thank you all so, so much! Also thanks to midnightwings96 whose help and feedback is always invaluable, and who also posted an update to Ruin yesterday, so go check it out if you are a follower of that story :D**

**I'll probably post the first gigantic chapter of the sequel within a week, so keep an eye out if you liked this story! Love to you all! :D**


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